More Data Loss From Government and ID Card Firm
Posted August 22nd, 2008 by quarsan
The Home Office continue to show themselves as 'not fit for purpose' by losing yet more highly confidential information:
personal details and intelligence on 33,000 serious offenders, dossiers on 10,000 “priority criminals” and the names and dates of birth of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales. There is also information on an unspecified number of people enlisted on drug intervention programmes.
Who is responsible for this? Who would be so daft as to decrypt this information and put it on a memory stick, then lose it?
PA Consulting. Who were appointed by Blunkett to prepare the ID Card scheme.
PA Consulting. Who boast on their website about being a finalist in the Change Management Awards for their work on the project where this data was lost.
You really couldn't make it
You really couldn't make it up.
As I've said elsewhere, the worrying thing is that these are only the losses we know about, i.e. ones where the data/storage couldn't easily be replicated, or where it was being sent somewhere and failed to arrive.
How many consultants are wandering about with copies of databases on their memory sticks which, if they lose, they can simply replace without anyone being any the wiser?
The fact that the Home Office still thinks that ID cards are a good idea speaks volumes about their knowledge of both computers and human nature.