Monday, November 03, 2008
Protecting the public
The Prime Minister was speaking hours after it emerged that a memory stick containing the passwords to a government website used to submit online tax returns had been lost.
Speaking on the second day of his trip to the Gulf, the Prime Minister said it was caused by "mistakes" which were “human”.
He also sought to clear government officials of blame, stressing that a private company – Atos Origin, a computer management firm – had accepted responsibility for the loss.
The Department for Work and Pensions was forced to shut down the Gateway service, which is used by consumers to pay parking tickets and fill in tax returns after the data, on a memory stick found outside a pub.
In many ways he is stating the obvious. There will always be human error, and let's face it there are far too many examples of data being lost by government and its contractors by this method in recent times with 277 data breaches reported since 25 million child benefit records went missing nearly a year ago..
It is the role of government to put in place systems and safeguards to reduce the chances of this happening. However, they have not been so successful at this either. What is worrying is that they plan to take on even more data including a system to back up their expensive and unnecessary ID card scheme and a giant "Big Brother" database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK.
Surely if the Prime Minister recognises the dangers of holding so much information on us he would reconsider the direction his government is taking. The fact that he is not prepared to do so despite his frank admission indicates a certain recklessness with our personal security that needs much greater justification than has been forthcoming so far from Government Ministers.
Labels: ID
Those 25 million families affected by the loss of Child Benefit records have every right to complain and be very angry.
: 9:13 AM...and from 2010 ALL uk police forces will be issued with on-the-spot fingerprint scanners.
: 9:21 AMI suspect there is no such need, but if the computers are insufficiently protected it happens anyway - e.g. easy source of data for program testing - WHICH SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED.
The only staff who should need access to raw personal data should be those in system maintenance roles who might need to patch data which has been screwed up due to a system error - it does happen and when it does the data may have to be repaired manually.
Everyone else should only have strictly controlled access to OUR personal data.
IMV USB ports etc should be disabled by default on government desktop & laptop computers, only enabled for a specific need and only for limited periods.
Likewise most government computers shouldn't be equipped with writeable optical drives.
: 9:39 AM<< Home
