Page A2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 29 September 2026
SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY
As it ran on the front
You will be looking for the penalty. There is none. Not reduced — unavailable. Nearly three million people had their Social Security numbers and the jobs they have held exposed by the Department of Defense, and no statute puts a price on the Department doing it. Sovereign immunity is not a defence a government raises; it is the condition in which a government is sued only where it has agreed to be sued. It has not agreed here.
In June, South Korea's data protection commission fined Coupang, an e-commerce company, six hundred twenty-four point six eight billion won over a breach the commission says exposed millions of user accounts. Four hundred and eight million dollars. Four hundred and eight.…
…(cont) A commission reaches a company. Nothing reaches the Department. You are issued one Social Security number and hold it for life ... and exposing nearly three million of them cost nothing.
All winter the gate stands open. The fox walks in unhurried.
“They let go of your Social Security number and your work history, and the bill came out to zero, because nobody in Congress ever wrote the line that makes the Pentagon pay for it. In June South Korea's regulator took four hundred and eight million dollars off a shopping company for the same kind of spill. You carry that number until you die; they carry nothing, and you are the one paying for the credit freeze.”
“Look, a breach is unfortunate, and the Department has been very — did I say very? That does not sound like me — the Department has been responsive. There is no statute here, which tells you Congress looked at this exact situation and decided a penalty was not warranted, and I would not second-guess Congress. Besides, fining the government means taxpayers fining themselves, so the people asking for a fine are asking you to pay twice.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
Pentagon breach exposed sensitive data on nearly 3 million peopleThe breach included Social Security numbers and details about jobs people held.
· Healthcare data breach exposes 3.75M patient records from the morgue, 30 Aug 2026
· The South Korean data protection commission fines e-commerce company Coupang ₩624.68 billion (US$408 million) for a data breach that the commission says exposed personal data from millions of user acc from the morgue, 11 Jun 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.