Last year, Federal agents notified more than 3,000 companies that their computer systems had been hacked. There has been a lot of anxiety recently about the kind of information the Federal Government may be collecting about American citizens as part of their efforts to protect our country from the ongoing terrorist threat. But the truth is that private companies like Target hold vastly larger amounts of sensitive information about us than the government could ever think of doing. And they spend much less time and much less money protecting their sensitive data than the government does. If Target or any other company is going to collect detailed information about its customers, they need to do everything possible to protect them from identity thieves. Because what, in fact, everybody was fearing about the NSA, which has never come to be true, has come to be true about the American private sector.