Oops, we did it again...
How worried should people be, asks the BBC? It is quite clearly time, as the Simpsons has long advised us, to crack open each other's heads and feast on the goo inside.As I'm one of the 35million in the country not affected by this most monumental of fuck-ups, I'm sure you'll excuse me if I find the whole thing ever so slightly amusing. On the surface, while no politician can personally be blamed for a "junior" official losing two discs containing the entire child benefit database, what certainly can be attributed culpability is this government's insistence on empty managerialism in rhetoric while being completely hopeless about actually managing anything in its own departments. Why in the name of all that is fucking holy did a "junior" official even have access to the entire fucking database? What sort of even slightly large business would put all the personal information of its customers onto discs, when they can so easily be lost or fall into the wrong hands, especially when they contain such sensitive data? Why was anyone allowed to put such things through the internal mail, when they should have been delivered by hand if delivered at all in hard copy? Why couldn't the data be transferred across a secure network rather than on two discs? Why was the data on the disc not even slightly encrypted, apparently only passworded? You can ask numerous more questions and still not even get close to finding out just how dysfunctional some government departments might well be.
This is of course the same government that wants to set-up yet another huge database with the details of every child on it, although "celebrity" children and others whose detail is deemed more "sensitive" than others might be lucky enough to be excluded. There's the Spine, upon which the medical details of everyone whom uses the NHS is to be uploaded. Finally, there's the daddy of them all, the ID card database, which campaigners have long been arguing is far more insidious and dangerous than the ID cards themselves. The government couldn't have proved them more right if it had tried.
Labels: Alistair Darling, child benefit database, fuck-ups, ID cards, incompetence
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My favourite bit was Darling saying that if we had biometric ID cards then it wouldn't matter so much if this data leaked as it would be unusable. Way to stay on message.
Just as a point password-protection can be encryption, just normally a very weak form. I've shown the differences in my latest entry.
Posted by
FlipC |
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 10:01:00 AM
Please forgive the intrusion, I've been following your blog for some time and wonder if you would mind answering a few questions. I'm a PhD student from the University of Aberdeen and I'm doing some research on online news work, particularly the social forces that are reshaping the public’s relationship to news media, the opportunities that the web has provided for innovation and new news management, and the ways in which news work and news-workers are affected by technological change. Would be fantastic if you (or anyone else reading!) could contact me at b.gotts@abdn.ac.uk
Apologies again for the spam, tried to send this email privately but it returned. :(
thanks,
Ben
Posted by
Ben |
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 2:34:00 PM