According to ZDNet, with only two months left before government agencies must figure out how to deal with data breaches and data theft, federal bureaucrats are scrambling to meet the impending deadline. The deadline was created by a White House directive that gave all federal agencies until September 22 to figure out the best way, using their “best judgment,” to create a plan to secure personal data and to alert them if it is compromised.

Meeting that deadline is “definitely a challenge,” says Mischel Kwon, chief IT security technologist for the U.S. Department of Justice.

The chief privacy officers for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission say they are taking steps to comply with the White House order.

The FTC’s chief privacy officer, Marc Groman, says his agency prepared a 12-page compliance plan last month. The plan covered topics such as notifying third parties, notifying individuals and identity theft risk analysis.

According to IDG News Service, the State of Texas recently published Troy Aikman’s address and Social Security number on the Internet. The Texas Secretary of State’s SOSDirect Web site displayed the personal information of Aikman, formerly a star quarterback with the Dallas Cowboys, and thousands of others.

Texas has been automatically removing sensitive information from all documents filed with SOSDirect since June 2005, and the state is now in the process of redacting this information from earlier filings, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman with the Office of the Texas Secretary of State. But residents whose social security numbers are posted on SOSDirect need to contact the Secretary of State’s office directly in order to have them removed right away.

To help fight identity theft, the Department of Justice has proposed legislation to the Congress to improve the existing laws. The Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act of 2007, which was developed by the President’s Task Force on Identity Theft, would help ensure that victims could recover money for the time they lost in their attempts to repair the damage done by identity theft. Currently, a victim can only recover the actual monetary amount that was stolen from them.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the department’s proposed legislation would help victims “put their lives back together” and close gaps in enforcement.

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Justice Department is also trying to crack down on criminal rings that traffic in stolen documents and sell fake driver’s licenses, Social Security cards and birth certificates to illegal workers.

The Standard-Times reports that Massachusetts lawmakers have agreed on identity theft legislation, which aims to protect the public from the release of personal and financial information.

The law would require any company or government entity doing business in Massachusetts to immediately disclose a breach of security, whether it occurred in electronic or paper form. It also requires businesses or government entities to shred or destroy any personal information before disposing of it. The measure also applies to fingerprint and retinal scan data.

People who are victims of identity theft would be able to freeze new credit from being issued in their name for free. Others could do the same for a $5 fee.

The law won has unanimous House approval. The agreement, hammered out in a conference committee of three senators and three state representatives, now moves on to the Senate, where it is expected to be approved.

The L.A. Times reports that restaurants may have a solution to recent rise in the number of “skimming” scams in which waiters use hand-held computers to steal customers’ credit card information.

Pay-at-the-table systems are widely used in Europe and other parts of the world, but the U.S. is falling behind, largely because equipment makers have been unable to point to a reason restaurateurs should use the technology. However, identity theft provides a good reason. Some studies suggest that as much as 70% of all cases of credit card skimming stem from restaurant scams.

“Restaurants are the last holdout where you still give up your credit card. That’s why we think this is the next logical step,” said Paul Rasori, VeriFone Inc.’s vice president of marketing. Verifone’s system is about the size of a thick remote control and sports a square liquid-crystal-display screen and a numerical keypad. It accepts debit and credit cards and can automatically add a tip. Once the customer swipes a card, the information is sent wirelessly to a computer in the restaurant. A tiny printer spits out a receipt.