Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

GIGA, we say. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Or maybe Garbage in, Gas out. Food and yard waste into natural gas, converted to compressed natural gas (CNG) to power garbage trucks. So it’s garbage in, gas out, gas in to go get more garbage to make more gas…

South San Francisco Scavenger Company (SSFSC) is beginning to convert the food and yard waste it collects into CNG to fuel its collection fleet. Anaerobic digestion is the process used to break down the food scraps and food-soiled paper picked up from restaurants and other businesses in the area.

Anaerobic digestion is one of the processes used in sewage treatment. Typically it is the wet version of that process that is used in three- and four-stage sewage treatment. But SSFSC will use a dry digestion process.

Zero Waste Energy LLC makes the first system in the U.S. to use dry anaerobic digestion to make automotive fuel. A byproduct is organic compost.

SSFSC is trying to expand its collection program to include more businesses in the area, then extend collection to residential areas too.

Food and food-soiled paper are discarded in quantity every day. Think of not having to bury them! Think of not throwing food discards and prep materials, napkins and wrappers as garbage and sending it to the landfill.

Wouldn’t it be something, to have all our food waste picked up frequently and shipped to, um, some processor like TerraGreen? All the food waste and food-soiled paper from the schools, restaurants, grocery stores, homes, hospitals? Instead of using TerraGreen’s heat and compression (if it does, or might someday), anaerobic digestion would create fuel.

A while back we heard that Casella was going to do something like that at the landfill. At least they were going to harvest methane. And methane can be utilized as fuel. They might power their own operations with methane, at the landfill. maybe they could make CNG for their trucks?

Finding a safe way to reuse sewage sludge has been a conundrum for as long as we have had treatment plants, it seems to me. But the food waste part of our garbage would not contain the heavy metals and other toxics found in household garbage, or sewage, with cleaners and paints and chemicals galore.

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The Social Security Administration (SSA) has been closing field offices and trimming its workforce, and switching to an Internet-based service.

Some of the functions will be outsourced. That is, the agency will utilize contractors for much of what SSA employees have done. One such contractor is Experian.

You’ve heard of them. They are one of the leading credit reporting agencies.

You might have heard of Experian in other connections. In 2012 SSA used Experian’s services to combat fraud and check identities for My Social Security, an online portal providing around-the-clock access to individuals who wanted to check their benefits statements and earnings.

SSA provides Experian with the data for SS card holders: last and first names, birthdates, addresses and phone numbers. An individual wanting to set up a My SSA account is redirected to Experian for verification. He is asked a few questions, his answers are checked against what Experian has in its credit report database, then sent back to the My SSA site to finish registering. About 14 million have registered.

Trouble is, Experian has a checkered record when it comes to cybersecurity. A few years back its subsidiary, Court Ventures, sold personal data about hundreds of thousands of us to a ring of ID thieves.

But, Experian protests, it didn’t own Court Ventures yet! It was in the process of buying it, but the deal was not yet consummated. Well, after the acquisition was finalized, the scheme continued quite a while. Both the Secret Service and the FBI are looking into the mess.

An Experian veep testified before a Senate committee that the company had not detected the wrongdoing in the course of its “due diligence” prior to buying Court Ventures.

The officer said that Experian had not had full access to all the information it needed. Nine months later the Secret Service told Experian about the scam.

A New Hampshire security breach listing website says Experian has had 22 reported breaches since 2010, while Equifax and TransUnion have had three and two. In Maryland there have been 78 for Experian, five and none for the other two.

The Federal Trade Commission went after Experian for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It and the other two giants were also in trouble for the same thing: not maintaining toll-free phone access to them during regular business hours. Experian paid $1 million to settle with FTC. The other biggies paid settlements too. That was in 2000.

That would teach them, huh! Maybe not. In 2005 Consumerinfo.com, an Experian subsidiary, paid $950,000 to settle more FTC charges that it had used deception in marketing  those free credit reports.

Then in 2007 Consumerinfo.com paid $300,000 on charges of having violated the 2005 settlement. This year Mississippi filed suit against Experian for allegedly allowing mistakes in its credit database to block jobs and loans for millions of Americans.

The whole idea of closing SSA field offices is being scrutinized by the Senate Special Committee on Aging. There are still millions of elderly people without broadband access and internet usage. Imagine that!

In general, we who are online are becoming more and more leery of having accounts hacked, and My SSA may be vulnerable. Fraudulent My SSA accounts have been created, and SSA benefits have been misdirected.

What’s a poor government agency to do? It must be responsive to our needs and to the Congress and calls for efficiency. It must modernize, and downsize, and maybe, use contractors. But it needs to do that with caution, and reject contractors with poor track records. In other words, Social Security needs to be security conscious.