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British MoD Stunned By Massive Data Loss
Master of Transhuman writes "Seems like nobody can keep their data under wraps these days. On the heels of the World Bank piece about massive penetrations of their servers, the British Ministry of Defense has lost a hard drive with the personal details of 100,000 serving personnel in the British armed forces, and perhaps another 600,000 applicants. This comes on the heels of the MoD losing 658 of its laptops over the past four years and 26 flash drives holding confidential information. Apparently the MoD outsources this stuff to EDS, which is under fire for not being able to confirm that the data was or was not encrypted."
Because there's a difference between the controlling party in power, and the machinery of state. And the dishonest media portrayal of things like this people have lost the ability to make that distinction, we get the whole "government is intrinsically incompetent" meme, and people come to believe that private-public partnership and running government like a free market is intrinsically better -- because the free market works and government sucks.
Cases like this therefore become so distorted that they are considered, in the public conciousness, as data points that cause people to trust government less with their data. Whereas the actual villain here is the policy of devolving governmental responsibilities to the private sector. But that is never, never, never portrayed as the story -- because the meme is "don't trust governments", and when the facts contravene the meme, the media print the meme.
We should be saying "No to outsourcing of private data -- because private companies cut corners to make profits." Instead, we blame the government because the government is accountable, rather than because the government is at fault. And that's seriously fucked up.
Additionally, all that is sending the British political discourse the way of the American one -- where a candidate's almost complete inexperience of government can be portrayed as a benefit.
As to why, I'm against that; well, that's left as a exercise for the reader.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It strikes me that the wonderful thing about outsourcing government, from government administration's standpoint, is that nobody is ever really responsible. The contractors can say government didn't properly communicate with them, oversee the operation, or allocate adequate funding. Government can claim that they did and it's the contractor's fault. Perfect. Everybody's happy. Except for the people who are supposed to be served, of course.