In my previous post – “The Israeli credit card breach”  I noted that there are  5 fundamental reasons why credit cards are stolen in Israel. None have to do with terror; 4 reasons are cultural and the 5th is everyone’s problem: “confusing compliance with security.
After reading the excellent article  by Sarah Leibowitz-Dar in the Maariv weekend edition, I realized that there is 1 constraint in Israel for improving data security:

בועז גוטמן, מקים המפלג לפדעי מחשב במשטרת ישראל.”

יש היום במשטרה חוקרי מחשב טובים שיודעים לקרוא ולכתוב אנגלית

Boaz Gutman, former Israeli police officer who started the computer crimes unit says that Israeli Police have good police officers who know how to read and write English.  If we had 30 instead of 20 we would be able to handle the case load

That one (1) constraint for improving data security in Israel and preventing credit card breaches is quite simply that most Israelis, including members of Knesset, the Police and Army simply do not understand English.

English after all, is not Israelis’ native tongue.   Israelis all use the Hebrew interfaces on their cell phones, use the Hebrew interface in Microsoft Office and send messages to each other on Facebook in Hebrew.

If Israelis spoke English fluently or at least understood English fluently they would be aware that there is a whole wide world out there where credit cards are stolen and Web sites need to be protected.

But no, we are like a small group of Jews living in a Russian shtetl and we do not know that there is an America out there.

Here we have Ms. Leibowitz and a bunch of  other Israeli journalists getting worked up over a fairly elementary hacking event resulting in the leakage of 14,000 credit cards from Israeli  Web sites.

If they would read English, they would know that in the past 6 years over 300 million credit cards have leaked in America.

In other words, your credit card is already out there. And life just goes on.