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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."
They could lock them in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that says "Beware of the Leopard", and eventually, someone will find them.
My guarantee of data destruction - thermite. It's the only way to be sure.
Well, ok, there are a lot of ways. You could extract the platters and scrub all the ferrite off with soapy water. You could just do a 1-pass wipe and it puts it beyond the capability of all known data recovery labs. There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.
But thermite is more fun.
The same guarantee that everybody else offers - cast iron, 100% and fully contractually enforceable. At least enforceable against the tiny limited liability shell company with no assets that you've spun off to do the actual work.
See, it's not how you do the work, it's how you do the business that matters.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Ok, I spot someone that's never dealt with systems at the high end.
There's a lot of prep work to unpicking things, and removing servers from secure areas, auditing them, planning to have them securely transferred and held in areas that are inaccessible with heavy physical security.
Logged/scanned to provide proof of transit, vetting everyone who handles the data volumes. Ensuring you have all sources of the data, auditing the backups, and pulling all of those, so on, so forth.
Everyone involved in this process will have to be security audited (most likely taken from an existing group of vetted people), and their services carry a premium.
There is a huge difference between destroying the data on your home gaming machine, and the sheer detail involved in transport and destruction of sensitive governmental machines.
£400k is actually a pretty lean number for dismantling the structure of this old project, considering that the infrastructure was sufficient to handle the predicted scale out to cover the entire UK population.