22 Aug 2008

PA/Home Office: the dance of the data nitwits

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.

 
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