25 millions claimants details lost

HMRC have lost the whole child benefit database containing name, address, personal details and bank account details after they sent cd's by post from northeast to london. They advise all bank account customers to check statements for unusual activity and to inform the bank immediately. The stress not to give out personal details to avout fraudulent use. We can obviously rely on the gov to provide this. The gov assures us that the id database will of course not be prone to this sort of fiasco. Do they honestly expect us to believe this?

Reply to
daveetwo
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Ironically today some animal rights activists became the first victims of RIP III as police requested keys to decrypt data on seized computers.

If the Inland Revenue isn't up to running some simple encryption protocols, perhaps they could hire animal rights activists to do it for them.

FoFP

Reply to
M Holmes

I really doubt that they care.

M.

Reply to
Mark

They were actually not sent by post, but by the internal courier service, which is run by TNT Express, not by Royal Mail.

So far, I have not heard of any criticism of TNT Express, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if it had been Royal Mail there would have been an outcry in some quarters to privatise it on the basis that private firms are more efficient.

Reply to
Robin T Cox

Well, we could all make sure that we don't make the same mistake of voting them in again...however, the real and horrifying prospect is that it probably doesn't matter who's in charge, this is a general incomptence issue that seems to afflict government-level (or more generally, complex) organisations.

I'm absolutely 100% certain that give important data to anyone and it will be lost / leaked / corrupted at some point, best-efforts to prevent that from happening, aside.

Its quite simply the idea and not the implementation that's the danger. And with more and more data being collected and its ease in being copied, deleted, and moved around quickly, we ought to have a public debate about whether we ought to be going down this very slippery technology-based route. And I speak as someone in IT!

Reply to
<nospam

I've never voted for a candidates whose party formed the government and I do always vote.

I agree.

Correct. This is why such data not not be stored in a single place.

Yet again I agree.

M
Reply to
Mark

The people who screwed up by not following departmental procedure were some junior civil servants who were neither selected nor directly supervised by anyone elected to anything.

And why should the buck stop at the politicians? Why not fire, i.e. disenfranchise the electorate that I blame for choosing them? I understand Pervez Musharraf maybe soon be looking for a new country to run.

Tony

Reply to
Anthony R. Gold

I thought they just lost a couple CDs holding encrypted copies - I had never realised they had lost the database itself. Why does one only find out about this on Internet News from well informed people like you?

Tony

Reply to
Anthony R. Gold

Not encrypted copies.

Only password protected copies.

There's the rub.

Reply to
Robin T Cox

This password was on what exactly?

Tony

Reply to
Anthony R. Gold

Either on disc one, in a file called password.txt or else hand-written on the CD cover.

Reply to
Martin

:-)

Reply to
Anthony R. Gold

LOL

Perhaps i'm missing something here, but for huge amounts of personal data like this, shouldn't it be moved around by a named driver / courier ?

Christ - we used to have a courier in work to do a tour of our offices to deliver "internal" mail, and that certainly wasn't as sensitive data as this issue involves !

Reply to
Colin Wilson

Why is it possible to be able to copy that amount of data to CD without a very senior manager authorising it on the computer system? If you make a rule by writing it in a manual, in a paper memo or in an email then you are asking for trouble.

Peter

Reply to
PeterSaxton

I'm not sure why everyone (well, the press) thinks that the discs wouldn't have been lost if they'd been sent Recorded Delivery (well, Special Delivery Track and Trace).

I posted an eBay sale this way and it never arrived. Royal Mail paid the 30 compensation without a murmer suggesting it happens quite frequently.

Reply to
LSR

"Colin Wilson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net...

When I worked in a Revenue data processing centre years ago, when all IT was done in house (in the days of ICL mainframes), this is how tapes were transported to other sites, by our own drivers.

Reply to
andy

On Nov 22, 10:48 am, Hugh Mann

In this case it shouldn't have been possible for the junior staff to "cut corners" at all.

The fact that they apparently could (other than the possibility of a very bright but junior person who spots a security failing/loophole and exploits it rather than reporting it) is a failing in management, not in the junior staff, because management should have REQUIRED that there were processes in place that would make it impossible for junior staff to be able to get a dump of any database.

Tim.

Reply to
google

snipped-for-privacy@woodall.me.uk said.....

Agreed absolutely - that was part of my point. But it is the clamour for staff reductions and reduced budgets that has led directly to this. A disaster of this magnitude had to happen somewhere in the civil service, eventually. Good management has left the civil service, the only ones left are those too useless to get jobs outside. This in turn simply adds to the already low state of morale of the juniors, who are led by idiots and expected to carry on getting through the same workload as before, but with a fraction of the staff and no support from above. The politicians are to blame for the policy, but the public has to learn that baying on about "too many administrators" does not necessarily get the results they expect.

Reply to
Hugh Mann

I might agree that there are too many welfare claimants per civil servant, but the problem isn't too few civil servants, it's too many welfare claimants.

It's absolutely absurd that in a population 0f 60 million there are 25 million people on welfare. At most we should limit it to the bottom ten percent. With the numbers we have, there will be people on welfare who are living higher on the hog than some of the poor sods who're going out to work to keep them in the style to which they've become accustomed.

FoFP

Reply to
M Holmes

M Holmes said.....

Yes. I don't quite know how or when being a benefit claimant became a career choice rather than getting a helping hand, but the whole welfare system is in a sorry mess.

Reply to
Hugh Mann

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