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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
If you read TFA you'll see Labour pissed away £330m on ID cards, so 400K is peanuts by comparison. Also, the same "friends in the city" were the people labour spent that money with.
They need private contractors. Government officials are not capable of wiping their own arses, let alone data.
Shows what you know.
You have to empty the Recycle Bin!
I'm pretty certain there are those in the Conservative party that would love to outsource most of the NHS. The thing stopping them is that the NHS is a sacred cow.
They're effectively working on that right now. GPs are being given the "choice" to do their own admin, so they'll outsource their admin to private companies. Rawnsley said on the radio only this week that there's "no reason why NHS GPs should be civil servants".
1. Pick up servers
2. Drop in industrial shredder
3. ???
4. Profit 400.000 pounds
Personally as a UK citizen I'd much rather they paid someone who knew what they were doing to do it properly than just "wiped the disks".
For a start, you do realise that for data like this destruction of the physical storage medium is a requirement, right? (It's right there in the article)
Obviously, reliable destruction of data costs 400,000 GBP, right?. Please, don't be silly. It's really amusing how people are trying to justify silly things politicians are obviously doing to setup cash for their cronies.
Do you know how seized drugs are often destroyed?
Blast furnace.
Please tell me which data storage medium will survive blast furnace?
And then tell me what can possibly cost 400,000 GBP.
For 400,000 GBP I can build a whole damn system which will reliably destroy data.
I can see why. Many European countries have independent GPs. None have the crazy health costs that the US has. Overall health isn't that much worse than they're in the UK, and when you focus on the neighborhood (France, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands) they do better than the UK in fact.
One of the reasons for this is that GPs treat a large number of patients, with common afflictions. Statistics ensures that this has predictable volumes, and also predictable costs. In a sense, they're like band-aids. You can manage on numbers alone. Specialized rare health care is harder to manage on an economic base, which is why closer government oversight could be desired.
What they call coalition government we call bipartisanship, right?
No, it's a coalition government - rule by more than one party in the same cabinet/government. Quite common in Europe, unheard of in the states (though you do have cohabitation between a president and a congress or senate hostile to them quite often).
A true coalition in the States would have (for example) Obama appointing Dick Cheney or Ron Paul as his vice-president, and working with him day to day and appointing advisers from other parties, but the systems are so different that it's hard to compare. Typically a coalition is made up of one large party and one or more small ones to make up the numbers, so in the strongly bipartisan system of the states, it's unlikely to happen.
And since you seem to know all about data destruction, please tell us what is the right way to do it.
It isn't simply about destroying the data, it's about making sure it is documented and verified. Same way that a small screw on an aeroplane will cost far more than the one you get in the shop even though they are same thing.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
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.
You clearly do not grasp the sheer idiocy, incompetence and utter lack of any skills whatsoever which characterises the British civil service. These days there IS no IT department apart from the outsourced PFI numpties who charge for each and every action performed. This is why whole database dumps get transferred all over the place; there isn't anyone who has the handy database skills to run a quick SQL query and put out only the required data into a twin-key encrypted package, because the way the PFI deal was written every such action costs the Government money.
Add to this the last Government had a number of highly embarrassing incidents of data loss, where USB sticks were let on trains, and in one case CD-ROMs of sensitive data were encrypted, but the password for the encryption was written onto the media disks themselves. The civil servants were complying with the regulations, but doing so in such a way that no hassle over passwords would occur. The same civil servants that did this are still employed, and the UK Home Office (which is dealing with this data) has the reputation of being the dumping ground for all the most incompetent, most useless and most stupid civil servants in Government.
Outsourcing data disposal like this is the safest way to ensure complete destruction without any little unofficial backups being taken and sold on, or people "forgetting" to wipe the disks before ebaying them, and so on. 400K is peanuts compared to the cost of cleanup after a data leak.
Interesting. So you're an expert on Public sector software.
Some of it is a travesty, yes. An awful lot of it is actually pretty decent. And some of the internally developed stuff is absolutely top notch.
I work in the NHS, and the amount of stuff I've had to turn down from commercial vendors because they frankly don't have a clue is astonishing. Stuff written by places like medical physics departments go into the devices that actually get used front line in medical equipment.
Interesting to see you're so sure that the software will get written anyway.. Where did you hear that? With sources? Or are you merely posting hot air?
With the current cuts in the UK, if something isn't actually proven necessary, it's in great danger of vanishing (and speaking of someone on the inside of that, it's not always a bad thing). This project is as dead as the dodo. The work to date is a writeoff, with no new investment.
If you really want to gripe about something, complain about the idiots who started the whole venture, despite being told by everyone who really knew about these things that the whole thing was unworkable, ineffective, costly and a complete waste of money. Every thing it was ever justified as fixing was debunked in a thoroughly methodical manner. Yet still they insisted on starting it up.
Idiots.
In line with some of the posters below: Presumably this mythical IT department has other stuff to do. I know governments are inefficient, but still I reckon you'd be taking a bunch of people away from other necessary work. Secondly, which IT department? I'd guess there are many IT departments that operate for the different parts of the government, you think anyone is going to give their people over to a project outside their remit for free? Do you take on staff to do the job, leaving yourself the difficulty of getting rid of them afterwards?
I think the government wastes money as much as the next guy, but in this case it looks like a reasonable figure (contrasted with the projected - and undoubtedly massively underestimated - costs of the ID card scheme) for the work required, and the most efficient way to do it is to hire some people who have the equipment, experience and expertise to do the job. So long as the contracts are written properly (e.g. fixed time and money, some reasonable method of ensuring that the company doesn't walk off with the cash having done no work etc. etc) then what's the problem. That's the only area that should be under scrutiny, but the only people that ever seem to look at that side of things are Private Eye...
I like the circular notion of documenting the disposal of someone's personal information.
"No Mr. Smith, your data was fully deteled. I have the document right here to prove it: 'Mr. A. R. Smith, born 17th Feb 1963, married to Mrs. C. J. Smith, degree from Cambridge, DNA sample number 0900303093029298992,' etc., etc. and here at the bottom, 'Deleted' and it's stamped by three separate officers. Yes sir, your data has definitely been destroyed."
They dont have the right equipment, nor hold the appropriate certification, to perform secure data destruction.
The right way to go about a *specialist* task is to hire the appropriate *specialists* in their field. Not general IT staff who have neither the time, qualification or equipment to do the job properly
So the secure transport is free?
The time to derack the servers is free? Oh, and the accredited,SC level people just appear on a whim?
You appear to be dense enough to assume it is all about the final step. It isnt.
No. To have a coalition government, you need more than two parties. It is one of the outcomes when no single party manages to gain an overall majority. In this case, the largest party was the Conservatives, the second largest was Labour, and the third-largest the Liberal Democrats, with a smattering of smaller parties and independents. The government was formed by a coalition of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. The Prime Minister is the head of the Conservative Party, the Deputy Prime Minister is the head of the Liberal Democrat Party, and the cabinet is made up from members of both parties. Government policy is driven by both parties, although more by the Conservatives.
Another alternative in this situation would be a minority government, where the Conservatives (with the largest bloc) attempted to form a government by themselves, but had to persuade members of other parties to vote with them or abstain for every issue they wanted passed. This is a bit fragile: last time it happened in the UK, it only lasted a few months before a vote of no confidence in the government passed, triggering a general election.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
After 13 months of Tory rule, you have forgotten the Labour party's previous practices.
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