UK Government Staff Caught Snooping On Citizen Data

An anonymous reader writes "More than 1,000 UK government staff have been caught snooping on citizen data — including criminal records, social security, and medical records. From the article: 'The U.K. government is haemorrhaging data — private and confidential citizen data — from medical records to social security details, and even criminal records, according to figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests. Just shy of 1,000 civil servants working at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), were disciplined for accessing personal social security records. The Department for Health (DoH), which operates the U.K.’s National Health Service and more importantly all U.K. medical records, saw more than 150 breaches occur over a 13-month period.'"

Comments

Lack of information

[abigsmurf]

The problem I have with these figures is that they give no details of the nature of the offences.

Were these all "I want to find embarrassing data on my ex or a celebrity!"? Were some of them just "staff member legitimately needed to access an account and should've waited for his boss to authorise first".

How many of them were procedural mistakes and how many were genuine cases of snooping? A high number of the former would paint a very different picture and asks different questions to a higher number of the latter. But then Dispatches is a horribly sensationalist program so I doubt they care.

Re:The arrival of Big Brother, finally ?

[TheRaven64]

The Stasi, like the Gestapo, relied on informers. They both worked in a situation where everyone was doing something illegal and an accusation was about all the evidence that was required. If they wanted to intimidate or eliminate someone, they just needed to pressure a neighbour or acquaintance into informing on them. This meant that they were intrinsically limited. Both were relatively small organisations and it would take several weeks of several agents' time to get one person. Their power came from the fear that they generated: everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been arrested on trumped-up charges and never seen again. It was unlikely to happen to you, but it could.

The problem with this kind of database and monitoring is that it means that any Stasi-like organisation can be run efficiently. Want to eliminate everyone in a certain category of political undesirables? There's an app for that...