Federal News Radio reported yesterday that they had uncovered a spreadsheet with social security numbers of 25 active service members on the Army Web site hidden only through the "hidden columns" feature of Excel. Supposedly, the Army had been told about the page months ago.

Aside from the probable violation of the Privacy Act and the clear violation of the recent OMB memo urging an end to unnecessary uses of SSNs, the most shocking thing to me is how easily this problem could have been fixed months ago simply by saving the document as a pdf rather than posting a spreadsheet in Excel.

Am I missing something?