In May of this year, I wrote a column titled FBI Computers Worked Very Efficiently for the Bad Guys. In the column, I reported on allegations that certain FBI agents accessed information from national crime computers and provided the information to stock traders.

Well the bad guys are at again. It’s the SEC's computers this time, and the “Bad Guy” is actually a woman.

According to The Washington Times, Mylene Chan, an employee of the SEC, was forced to resign after it was discovered she had sent sensitive data on American computer companies to China in what U.S. officials say may be a case of economic espionage.

Chan, a computer and online-service analyst with the SEC for 10 months, left the commission in July after coworkers discovered she had compromised sensitive information by sending it to Shanghai. Chan, a Chinese national, sent an email in July to coworkers stating that "for personal reasons, I am leaving SEC and will be returning to Hong Kong. I resigned yesterday."

In actuality, she was fired. The dismissal was triggered by SEC employees who discovered that Chan had accessed a commercial database containing confidential, non-public information used by the SEC to screen companies. A coworker in the computer office discovered that database files had been corrupted and that several e-mails to Chan from China were discovered in a computer after she had used the database. Chan also was found to have sent sensitive material via e-mail to an address in Shanghai.

At the time of her firing, she was escorted from the SEC building by security personnel, and her office was sealed. And, oh yeah, the case was covered up by the SEC and never reported to the FBI as a case of economic espionage. "We have not seen anything on this," said an FBI official.

As I wrote in my column in May, a day doesn’t go by without some new announcement of expanded government plans to track e-mails, tap phones, etc. The government plans to infiltrate everyone from religious organizations to political groups, all in the name of fighting terrorism. But since it is dubious all this new data can be processed in any intelligent fashion, all the government is really doing is building a greater superstructure so you and I can be tracked by the bad guys. The FBI couldn’t identify in advance the 9-11 attackers and the SEC didn’t identify in advance the Enron and WorldCom scams, despite the mountains of data the SEC collected on these companies. It was too much data to sift through and/or the real scammers provided false information.

But now we see again what all this data collection is really good for. It helps the bad guys. The bad guys want very specific information. This is the easiest data that can be culled from government computers, and time after time, we see the “Bad Guys” with laser focus figure out ways to get at that data.

I have said it once and I will say it again. Let’s pull the plug on government data collection computers immediately. They are a source for potentially much evildoing. The greater the power of government supercomputers, the greater ferocity with which they will eventually be used against us, our children or our grandchildren.

Stop the collection of data on innocent Americans now!