That’ll calm fears about the national database

Customs and excise loses 25 million records when two computer discs go missing in the post:

Alistair Darling has blamed mistakes by junior officials at HM Revenue and Customs after details of 25 million child benefit recipients were lost.

The Chancellor said information, including bank details of 7m families, had been sent on discs to the National Audit office by unrecorded delivery.

The discs had never arrived at their destination, Mr Darling told MPs.

He apologised for what he said was “an extremely serious failure” but insisted people were not at risk from ID fraud.

The records include parents’ and children’s names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit and national insurance numbers and in some
cases, bank or building society details.

He said the missing data was not enough to access accounts on its own but anyone who thought they had been the victim of fraud would be
reimbursed by the banks.

It’s not just the fact that the discs were lost that’s so bad, but also that junior officials apparantly can hand out this information willy-nilly. The same sort of sloppiness will happen again if a national database is implemented as Labour wants to, but on a larger scale. I’ve worked on a few highly sensitive IT systems myself, but I’ve never ever encountered this sort of incompetence. You just don’t sent discs –“password protected” or not– out over the post when they contain this sort of data. That would’ve been a firing offence in any project I worked on even if it was just the data of one person, let alone a couple of millions.

This sort of fuckup is only possible because New Labour fundamentally just does not understand IT or what basic competence in these matters entails. Because this grasp is missing from the top down within government, junior officials were allowed to handle sensitive data in this way.