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Yesterday's announcement of the leakage of private data on 25,000,000 people is, frankly, a staggering story of governmental ineptitude. Don't doubt there will be similar events to come in the near future. Why? Because this is just the most recent occasion. While not personally responsible this happened on Alastair Darling's watch; he once prided himself on avoiding headlines, so hearing him squirm on the hook on the 8.10 Today interview was pure schadenfreude.
We have this government's merger of two massive departments while cutting back a quarter of their combined staff and at the same time expecting the result to be an efficient, streamlined operation. Instead we have rooms full of unopened post, and the idiocy of having private information on a national database that still needs to be physically shipped around the country for audit. And the level of security in place for doing so is in actual fact little better than like asking TNT to take out your trash. Forget all previous assurances of "you can trust us with your data", because all along this has been the reality.
This is not the first embarassment of this kind, and on the lead-in to last night's Newsnight Jeremy Paxman asked something like "Can you imagine this being any worse?" Well, yes I can, when the proposed National ID database, if it ever comes into being, is compromised in a similar way, and I hope this event has provided several more nails in the coffin for this Orwellian future for the UK. Any government that has to repeatedly assure us they are "learning the lessons" these events teach are clearly not learning anything, and I don't expect a Tory or LibDem government would do any better: these projects of centralising personal data are too often simply too massive to be compromised by the very human weakness of a poorly-paid junior civil servant acting without adequate supervision, as is the case here.
Also, as has been pointed out by several, this is less of a security issue and more of a cultural problem. If we continue down this path it will get progressively worse until, hopefully in the near future, the UK government of whatever party actually backtracks and announces that further plans for centralising data on such huge scales are a meaningless way of tackling the problems they are meant to address.
No2ID.
We have this government's merger of two massive departments while cutting back a quarter of their combined staff and at the same time expecting the result to be an efficient, streamlined operation. Instead we have rooms full of unopened post, and the idiocy of having private information on a national database that still needs to be physically shipped around the country for audit. And the level of security in place for doing so is in actual fact little better than like asking TNT to take out your trash. Forget all previous assurances of "you can trust us with your data", because all along this has been the reality.
This is not the first embarassment of this kind, and on the lead-in to last night's Newsnight Jeremy Paxman asked something like "Can you imagine this being any worse?" Well, yes I can, when the proposed National ID database, if it ever comes into being, is compromised in a similar way, and I hope this event has provided several more nails in the coffin for this Orwellian future for the UK. Any government that has to repeatedly assure us they are "learning the lessons" these events teach are clearly not learning anything, and I don't expect a Tory or LibDem government would do any better: these projects of centralising personal data are too often simply too massive to be compromised by the very human weakness of a poorly-paid junior civil servant acting without adequate supervision, as is the case here.
Also, as has been pointed out by several, this is less of a security issue and more of a cultural problem. If we continue down this path it will get progressively worse until, hopefully in the near future, the UK government of whatever party actually backtracks and announces that further plans for centralising data on such huge scales are a meaningless way of tackling the problems they are meant to address.
No2ID.
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