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UK ID Card Scheme Data Deleted For £400K
DaveNJ1987 writes "It will cost the British government only £400,000 to destroy the data for its failed ID card initiative. The data compiled by the National Identity Register, which was scrapped last year by the coalition government, will be disposed of for the relatively small sum — in government figures — Home Office minister Damian Green confirmed."
I'll show them how to destroy it for half the price.
I see they've hired some 3rd party firm to do it. That stuff, both kit and data will turn up in a year or so's time. Guaranteed. Laptops on eBay and the data sold to ID thieves.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
This is the normal way the Tory Party does things. Services that the government could provide are actually business opportunities for private companies. Instead of just having IT wipe the disks why not make an easy £400k for one of your friends in the city?
Of far more concern is the NHS. Why let the NHS perform an operation that could be making some private company some profit?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Select All > Delete!
JUST PRESS CTRL+A, then mash the delete key. Press enter to confirm. DONE.
$20 please.
What they call coalition government we call bipartisanship, right?
The software won't be destroyed, it'll just get completed (no doubt in a half assed way all public sector software is) and sold to "emerging democracies"
All that tax payers money will have developed a product the tax payers will never use, and never get a return on. No not even tax, as they'll avoid taxes and be let off by the government as all big business seems to be allowed these days.
It's a fucking disgrace.
I will be happy to light a large bonfire for half of the £400k quoted.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
They need private contractors. Government officials are not capable of wiping their own arses, let alone data.
You had to join to get a passport. Try telling your boss that you can't go to the customer because you will have to put your data in the NIR.
£400k is still expensive. Why don't they do what they usually do? Just stick it all on a laptop and leave it at a train station...
Four hundred grand!? Why not do what they usually do? Put the data on a laptop and leave it at a train station...
"For 400,000 GBP I can build a whole damn system which will reliably destroy data." Are you contemplating
installing Windows ?
Chuck the disks in the ocean to a depth of say 17,000 feet. Should cost 5 grand tops.
I get reimbursed by the customer for the data anyway.
C'mon, you don't think that whoever does it for these peanuts isn't gonna do that too, do you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wasn't there another way to destroy the data?
(Taking it out to a field and sledgehammering it?)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Data cannot be created nor destroyed!
Did anyone think of just taking a couple of 50Gallons oil drums fill them with gas and shredded old tires put the drives in them and let these burn for a while; I realized that this does not sit well with many people due to the fact that it's bad for the environment. The other solution just melt all the data drives down along with a bunch of steels.
There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.
A cheaper alternative would be a flowerpot and some charcoal. Or they could send them to a commercial aluminium recycler to make it look more profesional.
£100 to destroy the data, £399,900 to hunt down all the backup tapes, memory sticks, cloud storage, DVDs and laptop copies made by low-level functionaries.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Heh... I would do it for next to nothing. Just buy me a ticket over the pond, give me a week in a nice hotel with food paid for then get me back home. Cant be more than a few thousand. And I could guarantee distruction too :-D
Yes you did. £35 went to register you. Idiot.
What did they do? carve it into granite...
I know much of this government and it's agencies are still stuck using old proprietary and insecure systems like windows (check out france), but £400k seems ridiculous... surely if it was compiled and stored with computers it would be cheaper to simply gather all of the physical equipment and incinerate that shit.
That seems to be missing the 5 billion pounds that was spent collecting it...
If I destroy equipment NOT only do I have to pay for the destruction but for the write-off for the equipment.
If I blow up your car the cost to you is NOT 1 stick of dynamite. It is the stick of dynamite, the cost of your car, the bill for the fire department and the kick up your arse for failing so badly at cost calculation.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We found a box of very old back up tapes and the government bureaucracy required to destroy them was insane! The tapes where so old the equipment no long existed or was manufactured. But since the label indicated it might have some personnel data backed we needed to prove what the contented where - weeks later tracking down 30 year old equipment we found it did in fact contained significant personnel data. Well that just opened up another can of worms - confirm the data was still needed or not, if we had to inform the individuals, etc. Three months later we could officially destroy them. So the bidding process started, evaluations of the bids, confirmation the data was correctly destroyed. 25 tapes that where 30 years old took nearly 2000 man hours and thousands in hard ware cost (that was used once), plus disposal cost.
Why not just throw this stuff in a volcano? If it's good enough for the One Ring, it should be good enough for some hard drives.
The TFA mentions the sum of 400k GBP only for the destruction of the data. I would expect the equipment write-off to be a separate sum, probably bigger.
I don't have the breakdown but (and I may be giving too much benefit of the doubt) the £400k should cover far more than pressing delete on a database. There's destroying the storage medium, security to make sure nobody's walking out with data... Not forgetting the costs of actually dismantling equipment, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are significant figures for an early property lease termination penalty, dilapidations and staff redundancies.
To digress a little, no it is not uncommon for staff employed at one governmental organisation to be paid a tax-free redundancy even when immediately re-employed at another.
Anyway, the main reason £400k is considered surprisingly small is because what frequently happens when a UK governmental project is scrapped is that there is a contractor somewhere due to be paid a fortune in "lost profits". While such arrangements are common in business, the level of compensation usually seems grossly inflated for government contracts, even allowing for the large scale. It's generally thought this is due to a combination of politicians/civil servants behave rather less cautiously when committing public money; supplier companies being all-too aware of the probability of cancellations of government projects and/or what everybody really thinks: because it becomes that much less likely the politician's pet project will be scrapped no matter how hated. That's not to forget fraud and under-the-table deals, but habit in the UK is not to attribute politicians with true malice what can be explained by arrogance and incompetence.
This'd work: Paper shredder for hard drives
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
i) Pressing 'delete' key - £1.00
ii) Knowing where to find delete key - £399,999.00
Chances are because they held onto it, someone has already sold that data to the highest bidder. Thieves love that stuff.
/s
Or someone will screw up and throw it it a garbage can. meanwhile... Thieves will get it.
Or! They already have a copy of all of those IDS stashed, and a few years from now, they find the copies, and someone will be asking this same question all over again. It will cost them $1,000,000.00 extra to get rid of it. Meanwhile... Thieves will still get it.
They are so screwed.
Never thought it takes £400,000 to run rm *