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UK Government Loses 15 Million Private Records
bestweasel writes "The BBC reports that a UK Government department has lost discs with details of 15 million benefit recipients, including names, addresses, date of birth and bank accounts. The head of the department involved, HM Revenue & Customs, has resigned and his resignation 'was accepted because discs had been transported in breach of rules governing data protection' so someone thinks it's not a trivial matter. The Chancellor will try to evade responsibility in the House of Commons at 3.30 GMT.
A similar leak of a 'mere' 15,000 records from the same department happened a month or so ago. At that time, they refused to say 'on security grounds' whether the information was encrypted." We just recently talked about Britain's consideration of legal penalties for situations like this. I imagine this incident will weigh on that decision.
Aiming for the World Record of record losing!
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
Ah, but with a national database of everything, the missing disks could be located with a simple search query!
At that time, they refused to say 'on security grounds' whether the information was encrypted.
...
That should read 'on job security grounds'
Not offended old bean, we were more than pleased to get rid
of that bunch of God-bothering homophobic nutjobs. Enjoy the
Turkey.
Toodle pip!
no no, why would you think that the people in the UK government would be that incompetent? The files were no doubt secured with a 30 character password, with no dictionary words or contiguous number sequences, a mixture of capitals and lower-case, numbers & other characters with not a single person's mother's maiden name in sight. Obviously, with such a complicated password, it would have to be included on a post-it note with the disc so that the audit office could actually use them.
FGD 135
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Did they look behind the couch?
That's where I always lose things.
They might be there.
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