WRITTEN ON August 22nd, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Identity, Transformational Government, What do we want?
Commercial break: Protect your bits! Join ORG! ———————————
*Sigh* More nitwittery (Beeb reports)
The loss of thousands of criminals’ details has prompted a demand by the Information Commissioner’s Office for “searching questions” to be answered. The missing memory stick includes un-encrypted details about 10,000 prolific offenders and data on all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales.Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said he was “absolutely horrified” by the loss and “government incompetence”.
The Home Office said a full investigation was being conducted.
A spokesman said the data was lost by private company PA Consulting and was “held in a secure format on site and downloaded onto a memory stick for processing – which has since been lost”.
PA Consulting has searched its premises and looked at CCTV recordings in an attempt to recover the missing memory stick.
Hurrah for the investigations and all that endless CCTV footage which will no doubt save the day. I haven’t seen this one described as an “isolated incient” yet. The PA spokespeople are saying nothing (PA are the folk who took so much dosh off the UK taxpayer for advising the Home Office/IPS down the route of the benighted ID Scheme.)
Hm. I wonder what the street value of that data is?
Wibbi: Showusabetterway has shone a wonderful light into the dark and complicated world of what government does with all the (non-personal) public data it acquires and hoards. Hundreds of bright sparks have chipped in ideas that seem bound to start some welcome fires. Now world: show us a better way to work with personal data! Let’s transform Transformational Government so that TG2 is the “right side up” mirror image of its sinister predecessor, not TG1 with go-faster stripes.
Extra thoughts:
- BBC headline is “Questions asked after data loss” Wibbi the headline were: “New privacy-friendly architecture introduced after data loss”
- They are working on TG2, aren’t they? I’d better check
- The charitable interpretation is that PA and Home Office seem to have acted as nitwits here, not crooks. But in an environment where data of this value is handled in this casual way…who wouldn’t become a crook? I wonder how many of the people working for Home Office or PA are now crooks. The temptation for committed but undiscovered crooks to join PA or the Home Office, or for existing predominantly law-abiding PA and Home Office staff to go over to the dark side is overwhelming. Data theft must be so easy! It’s all far from ideal.
6 Responses to “PA/Home Office: the dance of the data nitwits”
Sorry, NB that’s 29 million records in a single year.
The couriers should all wear really tight jeans and squeeze the memory stick into the watch pocket. Sexy and safe!
Alternatively, those really small memory flash cards can fit on the tongue. The flash card could then be transferred from courier to destination via a sloppy French kiss.
If, the courier was young and inexperienced, the promise of a French kiss, with tongues, at the end of the journey, would keep his or her mind 100 percent focused on the job!
If, the courier swallowed, just keep them in over night. Oh yeah!
I wonder if it has got to the stage where the government has lost so many private details that the street value of personal data has collapsed. If government makes such data genuinely valueless (after a decade of treating it as valueless) that would be curiously self-fulfilling.
Naughty officials! Bad Ministers! Craven, greedy, incompetent suppliers! Conniving, wicked trade association!
The charitable interpretation is that PA and Home Office seem to have acted as nitwits here, not crooks.
If one were less charitable, one might point out that there is such a thing as criminal negligence (and recklessness).
Good news for PA today though — they may no longer be designing the most stupid and evil database in Britain: CAP Gemini have beaten them to it with the awful ContactPoint…
and of course the Beeb has been keeping track on the volume of losses, and states that 29million records have been lost by UK.gov….
“Since the HMRC data loss fiasco, Whitehall departments have begun to include data of information leaks as part of their annual financial statements. An analysis of these figures by the BBC revealed that personal information disclosures across UK government departments, EXCLUDING (my emphasis) information on the lost child benefit CDs, averaged 300,000 records a month in the year up until April 2008 (the end of the UK tax year).
A Cabinet Office spokesman said that measures introduced in the wake of reports into the HMRC data loss had established improved data handling procedures. (errr, hallo???)”
Does anyone in UK.gov ever get prosecuted under the data protection act?