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Losing Personal Info On A Laptop Could Get You Charged
E5Rebel writes "The UK's data protection watchdog has called for legislation that would punish corporate or government officials with access to the public's personal data ... who lose it. Unencrypted laptops with this personal information which are lost or stolen will see their owners facing criminal charges. 'HM Revenue and Customs is among the organisations that have recently suffered high profile data security breaches as a result of laptops being lost or stolen. The HMRC laptop containing taxpayer data was encrypted - but other organisations have often failed to encrypt their machines.'"
What a vague rant. Near as I can tell, you disagree with punishing people who break the law, think that when people break the law there's "no recourse", and confuse media hysteria over gun crime with the actual facts (the whole of the UK has about fifty fatal shootings per year, hardly a crime wave).
Did you actually have a point, or did you just want to rant against the English? Do you even know the difference between England and the UK? I see no reason to single out the English for UK policies.
The problem with the whole "ignorance is not a defence" argument is that, as convenient a sound-bite as it makes, it's still an unreasonable cop-out.
No-one knows what every law in the country that applies to them says. Even if they did, many people could not understand the legalese without assistance. There have been demonstrations that show that even MPs who approve our legislation can't complete their own tax return correctly. Our own government frequently fails to follow its own laws because some official didn't know what some other official was doing — and that's their full-time job!
It may be a legal convenience to say that ignorance is not a defence, but ethically it is a very dubious principle if it isn't matched with an effective education policy that makes it a reasonable assumption that everyone should know and understand all the laws that apply to them. If you construct a system where no-one can know it, and then say that not knowing it is no defence, then you are simply criminalising arbitrarily, and that is universally the mark of a legal system gone too far.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
While it's true that the English legal system is different from the Scottish legal system in a number of important ways, there are a vast number of laws that pertain to both, including the Data Protection Act and this new law should it get passed. Typically a single bill is passed for the whole of the UK, and where the differences between the legal systems matter, there are special cases that form part of the bill. Consider it the legal equivalent of #ifdef SCOTLAND.
Furthermore, none of the differences between the two legal systems matter in the context of the grandparent, who appears to simply be ignorant.