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Another day, another massive data hack:

Capital One, the Virginia-based bank with a popular credit card business, announced Monday that a hacker had accessed about 100 million credit card applications, and investigators say thousands of Social Security and bank account numbers were also taken….The hack appears to be one of the largest data breaches ever to hit a financial services firm. In 2017, the credit-reporting company Equifax disclosed that hackers had stolen the personal information of 147 million people. Last week, it reached a $700 million settlement with U.S. regulators over that breach.

You know what would put a stop to this? Put in place statutory damages for every personal record hacked. No excuses, no safe harbors. If you lose the records, you pay. I’ll be nice and suggest $100 per record.

I’ll tell you this: if Capital One had to pay $10 billion because of this hack, they’d take security a helluva lot more seriously. What measures would they put in place? I don’t know, but I know that after an endless pity party about how this would be totally unfair and there was nothing they could do and it would put them out of business—well, then they’d magically figure something out. That’s always how it works.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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