Question for military people?

Question

I am in the Army Reserves and I have a problem. I was given orders to attend some training. The problem is a sgt. sent my orders to my personal email which i think is stupid. It has my social security number on it. the other thing that i think is wrong is other people in my unit received my orders because this sgt. wrote one email and attached every ones orders. I want to know if this is right first of all. If not i want to know if anyone knows where i can find the regs for this.

Answer 1

Sending that personal info through an unsecured network is a violation of operational security. It leaves it open for somebody to hack in and find out whats going on with your unit and a possibility of espionage. That thing happens more often than you would think. I have heard of 3 cases in the last year that a plot to kill soldiers was foiled. Just go up your chain of command to S1 or first sergeant and see that something is done about it. He could get in a lot of trouble over it

Answer 2

The reg you're looking for is called the Privacy Act which controls the dissemination of that information.  Since you're in the Reserves and don't have access to your gov. email all the time, they often times have to send that info out on personal email addresses.  When you're on a wide distro list of course everyone is going to have their orders available to everybody else.  My guess is that you also can see the orders for other people.  Are you afraid other members are going to post your orders all over town and people are going to laugh at you?  You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.  Suck it up, quit b*tching and welcome to the military.

EDIT:  You must not have been in the military for too long.  You'll realize that you will see people's SSN's all the time and you could get ahold of thousands of them if you wanted.  Their on orders, training records, ID's, everything.  People who are in the military should be above wanting to sell other people's SSN's.  If you really feel the need that this is a big deal, bring it up to your chain of command and ask them send it to you privately or block it out.  Seriously you worry way too much and the consequences are so high for doing something like that, nobody would even think about it.  Likely you won't be able to do anything but worth a shot I suppose.  You won't hack it long in the military if this is the biggest of your worries.

Answer 3

This is how they are doing now in some units because it cuts down on a paper trail, and you can get the orders sooner than you could if they mail them.  Also then if you need a copy printed out, it's at your expense.  My husband's Reserve unit emails out the orders partly because there are people that live in different states that travel a good distance to get to drill so it would take longer for them to get the orders.  

The only thing that you can really do is take it to your chain of command to see if there's anything that they see a problem with it.  But I don't think it's going to be a violation of regs, just a good idea with bad follow through because they do not list SSN's on my husband's orders that come through email.

Answer 4

haha your social is on a lot of paperwork, the military doesn't care if others have your ssn, there is nothing you can do about it... We had our ssn's on our master roster and there were thousands of copies floating around  our buildings (and my unit only had about 100 Marines and 6 Sailors)