Answer: Because it might make people think the tech sector is in good shape and outsourcing isn’t ruining it.
As far as our business press is concerned, we can’t have that.

I deliberately sat on this story from Wednesday to see if it received any coverage beyond its original location at Information Week. It hasn’t.

Here is an excerpt from an article with nearly unbridled enthusiasm:

Tech Worker Surveys Show Happy Days Are Here Again
Salaries are rising, jobs are secure, personal finances are solid, and skills in Web services, ERP, .Net, and Java are as hot as the weather outside.

Aug 2, 2006 03:00 PM

Tech professionals are more confident about their jobs right now than workers in other segments, according to two new reports.

Technology workers were more optimistic in July than they’ve been at any other time this year, according to Hudson, a professional staffing and outsourcing services firm which conducts monthly phone surveys of 9,000 workers in several industries, including more than 400 IT and telecom workers.

Compared to a base score of 100, job optimism among techies climbed 4.3 points to 112.5 in July. Tech pros were also more upbeat in July than the same month a year ago, which saw a confidence rating of 109.9.

Workers nationwide across all industries aren’t as buoyant. Overall, their confidence levels fell slightly last month—1/2 point—to 101.9, according to Hudson.

“It’s hot out there right now for tech pros,” says Kevin Knaul a Hudson VP. Fueling the confidence of tech pros is heavy demand by employers. “There is definitely more demand than supply right now,” he says. “It’s a struggle to keep up,” he says.

Especially hot are those with skills in Web services, .Net, Java and ERP. “All the major ERP vendors are updating their products this year,” driving the need for those pros, says Knaul.

Boosting tech worker confidence was optimism about personal finances—despite rising summer fuel costs—as well as a high level of job satisfaction. The number of employees who rated their finances as excellent or good rose 4 points in July to 56%. There was also a 7 point increase to 49% in the number of workers who indicated their financial situation was improving. Seventy four percent of tech workers said they were happy with their jobs in July, up from 71% in June.

Wait, I thought US tech jobs were disappearing. Here’s yet another one of Dr. Sanity’s “Command Hallucinations” to add to the false meme list.

In fact, this CNN Money item from November of last year (header and URL indicate that it originally appeared in November, even though the byline date is January 27), and this BizzyBlog post about venture capital from March, show that the tech sector has a hotbed of economic activity and entrepreneurship for over a year (the November 2005 CNN Money item says that things “….. began changing about six months ago.”).

A months-long stretch of stories like these not only would not have been ignored in the mid-late 1990s; they also would have, and often did, break out of the business pages and into the front pages and the evening news. But now? Forget it. If you can’t figure out why the press downplays and ignores stories like these, the good Doctor Sanity has the answer: “….. They might have to admit there is a Bush Boom, and that is simply not possible in their worldview.”

As to workers in the rest of the economy, their reading is a bit above 100, meaning that they’re slightly optimistic on the whole. That is amazing considering the steady drumbeat of economic gloom and doom The Associated Press, Reuters, and others persist in peddling.

Answer: Based on the amount involved, no. Based on what may have been a near-miss on a much larger amount, maybe.

A Nokesville, VA woman who had her identity stolen and credit score ruined scored a victory, but not at the level she and her husband wished (bold is mine):

Equifax owes damages in identity-theft lawsuit
Northern Va. woman sued credit-reporting companies and others
Saturday, August 5, 2006

MANASSAS — A federal jury has ordered Equifax Information Services LLC to pay a Nokesville woman $351,000 in damages in an identity-theft lawsuit.

The $45 million lawsuit against three major credit-reporting companies — Equifax, TransUnion and Experian Information Solutions — and creditor CitiFinancial Inc. was the second in Suzanne Sloane’s battle to reclaim her stolen identity.

In June 2003, Sloane gave birth to a son at Prince William Hospital. A few months later, a woman working in the hospital’s billing department lifted Sloane’s Social Security number from hospital records and used it to open several credit accounts, running up thousands of dollars in debt in Sloane’s name.

The identity thief, a temporary worker named Shovana Sloan, had previous convictions for identity theft and was on probation at the time she was working at the hospital, according to lawsuits filed against the hospital and the temporary agency that hired her.

Shovana Sloan was arrested in March 2004 and was later sentenced to two years in prison.

….. More than two years after her Social Security number was stolen, Sloane’s credit score was still hundreds of points lower than it was before the identity theft, she said in January.

After countless phone calls and letters yielded little progress toward restoring her credit, she and her husband, John, filed a federal lawsuit in November against the country’s three major credit-reporting companies. TransUnion, Equifax and Experian compile credit reports on people and provide them to lenders.

When the Sloanes discovered that they had been the victims of identity theft, they reported the crimes to the credit-reporting companies.

Their lawsuit says the three companies continued to show debts from the identity thief on the Sloanes’ credit report.

The suit also says the companies lack a mechanism to repair the damage identity theft does to a person’s credit report.

The suit sought a total of about $31 million from the credit-reporting companies.

….. The Sloanes said litigation wasn’t their first choice, but that it seemed to be the only way they could clear their credit history.

They tried for a year to work with the companies to fix the credit reports before resorting to suing, they said.

The bureaus claim that the bolded statement about their lack of a mechanism for REPAIRING damage from identity theft is not true. I frankly don’t believe them, as the consumer has to do all the cleanup work, or, at what is usually considerable cost, engage someone else to do the cleanup work for them.

One way to get around the considerable cost of a potential ID theft is to buy some form of ID theft cleanup/protection service from a financial institution or (guess who?) the credit bureaus themselves. Now that ID theft has turned into a profit center for the financial services interest, the incentive to clean things up is greatly diminished, consumer suffering be damned. In fact, if there aren’t occasional horror stories to advertise, sales of ID theft services will fall.

The amount of money in the jury award is chump change, and will be probably be paid by Equifax’s liability carrier. BUT….. if I were the carrier, I would insist that the Equifax and the other two bureaus (to the extent they can be persuraded even though they apparently didn’t end up having to pay damages) change how they handle identity theft repairs, and quickly. In the absence of reform, the carrier might threaten to withdraw coverage, and I doubt there are many other carriers who would be willing to fill the breach if the carrier did indeed fire its customers.

And maybe, just maybe, the bureaus will get a grip and realize that allowing consumers to freeze their credit would not only help prevent future lawsuits like the Sloanes’ but will also serve as a defense if future suits are filed. They saw the light in the late-1990s when California threatened to pass credit-scoring legislation and decided to release the scores after years of claiming that consumers would game the system if they received them. If they’re smart, they’ll get together and agree to put universally available consumer-friendly credit freeze and “unfreeze” procedures into place (only one call or one contact required to freeze or “unfreeze” at all three bureaus) to replace the hodge-podge of state laws that have already passed, with more coming soon.

There appears to be, at least from the facts presented, no excuse for what happened to the Sloanes. It happens too often, and it has to stop.

Ms. Dozier was critically injured on May 29 in Iraq. CBS released this e-mail (link is to MediaBistro Newser) from her last week:

Folks, I’m leaving hospitals behind, ahead of the deadline, or at least ahead of schedule. I’ve had a couple setbacks, and I still face a couple minor surgeries, but overall, the prognosis is far better than the docs had hoped just after I’d reached Germany. The teams at Balad, Landstuhl, and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. worked overtime — something like a dozen surgeries at least, including one that lasted 11 hours.

Just a few weeks later, I’m up on crutches and can even manage with a cane. It’s not pretty, but I’m walking on my own — and that, I also owe, to some hard-driving therapists at Kernan Hospital in Maryland, who kept saying, ‘Now try this…’

The next step: continued outpatient rehab to get my body used to being in motion full-time.

Thanks to CBS, my family and friends have been close by throughout. That, together with all the amazing cards and e-mails from across the country, has really pulled me through. I’ve told friends it’s been like having 10,000 guardian angels on my shoulders.

I’ve learned slowly how close I came to joining my friends, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, both killed by the blast. I owe my life to the quick actions of the 4th Infantry Division’s Sgt. Mootoosamy — who took charge of the scene, with his commander down and many of his men injured — and medic Spc. Flores, who patched me up. Even with a car bomb cooking off, sending shrapnel through the air just a couple dozen feet from us, Spc. Flores just kept calmly speaking to me and working on my legs — no wavering, no pause.

Not a day goes by without thinking of Paul and James — two of the most remarkable characters I’ve ever known. My heart goes out to their families, and I know no words to stop their grief. The last I saw Paul and James, they were rushing from their humvee to ‘get the shot’ of a young U.S. Army Captain, James Funkhouser, Jr., greeting Iraqi locals at a streetside tea stand. The bomb hit all three of them, together with an Iraqi liaison officer, and took all four lives.

I choose to remember them from the instant before the blast — each one of them consummate pros doing a job they loved to support the families back home they loved even more.