"Whose handcart is this and where are we going?"

[peteryoung]

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.

Comments

[andrewducker]

What really gets me isn't the loss of data (that was remarkably stupid, but largely because the low-level person even had access to that data to stick it in an envelope). It's the fact that it took them two weeks to tell the public.

Lack of accountability is my biggest problem with large organisations, and the government is a perfect example of this.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I think there was at least a week's worth of hasty behind-the-scenes discussion between government and the banks, who had to be alerted. A spokesperson said on Newsnight that the Government will reimburse anyone who loses out financially because of this failure.

At the moment I wonder if that accountability is as set-in-stone as we'd like, or if it may be retracted or altered to suit the Exchequer if there actually are real consequences.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

the Government will reimburse anyone who loses out financially because of this failure

Which translates as "Taxpayers will foot the bill".

[reverendjim.livejournal.com]

I really don't see how they can say that people will be reimbursed who lose out due to this. Yes, the banks are currently saying there hasn't been an upsurge in dodgy transactions. But in six months? A year?
Most of the data is personal stuff that can't be changed, and everyone changing their bank account is a complete pain that they don't seem to be suggesting. So, unless we all move, fake our date of birth and so on the data's still going to be useful. If bits of it start turning up in the future how are the banks supposed to know where it came from, leaving the Government to announce it was nothing to do with this "leak".

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

When I was growing up in Brasil, I used to hear about my country (as well as other "developing" nations) described as a Banana Republic, because of its corruption and widespread incompetence when it came to its government, institutions, etc.

Then I moved to Britain...

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Well, we don't grow bananas and - sadly - we aren't a republic, but our government is certainly incompetent. As for corruption, the ineptitude of those politicians guilty of it astonishes me: they sell us out for tiny amounts, such as a handful of free holidays or the promise of a boardroom seat when the dust has settled.