The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted on Tuesday on federal fraud charges, alleging it improperly paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups without disclosing the payments to donors, acting attorney general Todd Blanche said.
The center’s CEO Bryan Fair said the payments went to confidential informants in order to monitor threats of violence from the extremist groups – and that the information the center received was frequently shared with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The information gathered by the informants helped save lives, Fair said on Tuesday.
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC,” Fair said.
The Justice Department alleged that the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the same extremism that it claimed to be fighting. The indictment says payments of at least $3m went to informants affiliated with the…
IT & DATA SECURITY (MITIGATING THE “INSIDER THREAT”)
As seen in the TD Bank case, an employee with too much “access” can sell your customer data to syndicates.
- Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP): Employees should only have access to the specific folders and databases required for their current task.
- Access Revocation: Have a “Termination Checklist” that ensures all digital access (Email, VPN, Banking) is revoked within 60 minutes of an employee resigning or being dismissed.
- System Logs & Audit Trails: Enable “Read/Write Logging” on your server. If a customer’s data is leaked, you need to know exactly which login accessed that record and at what time.
- Encryption at Rest: Ensure that sensitive files (like your customer ID numbers or payroll spreadsheets) are encrypted so that if a staff member copies them to a USB, they cannot be read.