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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.'"
Teh UK Gov they want CCDP to go in where by they gather all the source and destinations of SMS, emails and browsers over the entire UK?! The UK Gov can't even look after stuff they've been in charge of for years, let alone this new stuff!
Mrs May, you and your departments can piss off if you think you getting any more my info!
freaking OBAMA
how's that HOPE and CHANGE workin out HUH?
Telling lies, well what a surprise.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Would be interesting to submit F.o.I requests in other countries (that have them).
Give someone access to people's private information and it will be abused. Here I'm giving you this box that contains pure awesomeness. Please don't open it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
All I could picture was Data from ST:TNG walking around saying "Rusebud"
Clearly they're just trying to find something to do in between watching episodes of Jeremy Kyle, so they're not wasting their time doing stuff like work.
Just shy of 1,000 civil servants ... were disciplined ...
WTF, how about sacking these people, they clearly can't be trusted in their position. Better still, make it a criminal offence (if it isn't already) and charge them.
I worked for the Ordnance Survey in Southampton after Uni. During training we were shown examples of where people had altered maps (someone wrote "HI" in land tiles in the North Sea, and a building was labled "Kate's cradle of filth"). It was explained to us that all work was logged. If caught we would be sacked. If we'd already left, we'd be chased up under the Official Secrets Act.
Whether it was all a threat, I don't know. But I certainly didn't risk finding out. Neither did any of my friends.
These people, though, were doing nothing wrong so they have nothing to fear from these unelected civil servants poking through their personal information, right?
...right?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
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.
TFA:
The penalties for a criminal offence go up to £5,000 ($7,900) in a lower magistrates court, or an unlimited fine in a higher Crown court. Some British politicians even called for some extreme data breaches to result in prison sentences — something dismissed by other parliamentary committee members. Rarely does the fine rise to five-figures, let alone six. Only recently, one Scottish local authority was fined £140,000 ($220,000) for five separate data breaches — the highest fine imposed by the courts to date.
When you fine the government, they just increase taxes. We need some personal accountability here.
This sort of thing always happens. The only way we could even begin to reduce it is to automatically fire anyone caught doing it, followed by criminal prosecution. Even then people will try to get away with it.
The only sane solution is to just accept that it can't be prevented and not allow data to be made available in this way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The FOI request revealled the number of civil servants who had done it but private enterprise is not subject to that act. The same thing will go on but it will never be publicised.
And I'm not going to buy any arguments that private enterprise security procedures would prevent it.
These are disciplinary actions, not administrative errors. Verbal ticking offs don't get listed. So they'll all real breaches.
“unauthorised disclosures of official, sensitive, private and/or personal information”,
I wonder how many of these are civil servants handing data over to Murdoch's newspapers & TV interests, given we know his newspapers even hacked telephones, buying info from civil servants about celebrities and politicians seems extremely likely. I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of those leaks were to Murdochs lot.
But the big revelation is that there are 200,000 civil servants approved to access the databases. That's an insane number! What did they expect, 200,000 possible leak points, the system is designed to leak private data like a sieve.
Most likely these are only the leaks that CAN BE CLEARLY IDENTIFIED as leaks. I think that's the TIP OF THE ICEBERG, since most of the data leakers would NEVER GET CAUGHT.
If true, this is a Bad Thing (though not terribly surprising). TFS is a bit wrong though. The Department of Health is not responsible for the NHS across the UK, and never has been. It has only ever been responsible for health in England and Wales, with the latter being devolved to the Welsh Assembly in 1999. Arrangements for social services are a little dfferent, but again this isn't necessarily relevant to all of the UK. Not that civil servants in devolved departments are perfect, but this is just another example of the UK stopping at the M25 (don't worry America, it's not just you, the British MSM and Westminster politicians do it all the time).
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
Sadly this will never get the attension it needs, the goverment will keep pushing for a single centrizied database either for the children for under the need to stop terrorisum, even with their track record of data fail. But we are just numbers right so who cares
WIkilink to list of UK data loses we know about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_government_data_losses
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7103566.stm
We know the goverment can track cars in real time, intercept sms and phone calls in real time, and after the centerized commications they will be able to cross ref that with your internet habbits. All in one super database to stop terrorisum.
I wrote to my MP who is a tory, I had a bit of a rant about the Goverment U-turning on this retraining data as it is one of the reasons i personally voted for them. The guy replied but it was like reading BBC news, a sales pitch that was all fluff and no content. It was all about stopping terrorisum it was just pure propaganda to push an ageneder that I personally did not think this MP was even aware of, it just seemed he was given a press release, told this is what he is going to be doing and refusing to look at anything else. The funny thing was I also wrote to my councilers and they also sent him letters along the same lines as mine all to be met with the same reply. Everyone is against this, and MPs are not even listening to their own people to pushing their own agenders.
L
I have 2 Police office friends, Well did have 2. One of them has admitted a number of times to just searching the records of people from school, friends and family. Basiclly the system is there he had nothing to do and just have a poke around, it jokes its like a secret facebook for police only. I dont have any secerts to hide, (my record has one instance of "he was stolen from" when i was 13 and lost a bike but some of my family are not so clean and now my friend knows all about them. The abuse of this information is every day and the people that do it do not think they are doing anything wrong, they are just using the tools they have been given for their own personal amusement.
Many decades ago I read that book "1984", I have to admit that I were scared shitless at the thought of the all-knowing big brothers controlling every single bit of my life.
But at that time, - decades ago, - even the worst government (East Germany, North Korea, China, Russia, to name just a few) just couldn't have the mean to know everything about every single citizen under their control
Oh yes, those bastard governments employed a lot of spooks and collected volumes of data, but determined citizens always found ways to defeat even the most draconian measure
No more
With the advent of computers and high speed network, not only they (the governments) get to collect all types of data, they can data-mine the data so much so that they can get to understand us more than we understand ourselves
We might not know where we might go, or what we might do, tomorrow, for example - by simply referencing our daily/weekly/monthly routines, our health data, our financial data, the people that we are in contact with, etc, - the government might be able to predict, with a certain degree of accuracy, what we might do, where we might go, a few days from now
This is scary !!
Way more scary than the scenario outlined in "1984"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html
Who is white? Are Middle East pople and Jews among the white? Or is it just Europeans?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Kingdom_since_1922#Contemporary_immigration_.281983_onwards.29
UK going the way US has? What would the time frame be? Does it matter? To whom? Is this why UK is snooping on citizens?
if any of these breaches can be linked to articles that have appeared in the British press.
...that we already know about, never mind the ones they've so far managed to bury.
The simple fact of the matter is, there is no system-level security. It's a system of trust where the ones with access cannot be trusted. They are, to put it mildly, and without exception, un-trust-worthy.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Let that be a lesson that the government won't be fucked with
????
Actually profit because these lazy asses aren't leeching off government money to spy on people.
Now you can automate more of the system without a case of "oh but people will be put out of a job".
Public work ain't a job unless you do something. Spying on people due to laziness isn't a job. Even the spooks do work.
In the US they sold data to foreign spies and organized crime.
Local police exploit the cesspool stream media about how 3 out of 4 people who get arrested have no job, have no health care, and are on some kind of drug. Why those horrible unemployed, uninsured, drug people, Mortgage fraud is okay, cooking books okay, banksters ole, no monetary terrorists here, and now for some kim kardashian's ass, myley cyrus nipple.
At great cost, expense, and complete fucking retardedness, 100's of the most wanted people mass arrested in Stockton, California, only to be released right back out. COPS say they are going back out again to do the same thing. Residents ask if this isn't a waste of resources. Stockton has been barely not become bankrupt recently. There's those fucked up iclei city council again. No CAFR documents, no puss stream media, no conspiracy here!
Facebook IPO $38 a share, this won't end well, but hey send our fuckin miac report brainwashed cops out to shoot another child for the crime of pulling a stuffed banana, after all that domestic terrorist child had it coming, and all those fucking lemon-aid stands, bakesales'. give me a break, it's work to smash them all down under your fucking new boots! Stiffen weak mind controlled noses, and get a nice sniff of that Macy's pussy, (better stroke fast the commercial's about to end) on sale up to %20. Metal thieves now are stealing Urinals out of Mc Donaldz. Some anonymous drug company rep said marijuana smells so bad, can't cure cancer, and just turns teens minds to mush where they start to sniff paint.
Radio hosts giggle it up when confronted with Constitutional law. In order to be President, a person must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, must be at least thirty-five years old, and must have been a resident of the United States for fourteen years. They think it's so funny. Ha ha ha Laughing it up. Meanwhile cops in Tennessee are stealing from people they pull over. One guy lost $22,000 trying to buy his eBay/Paypall car. FOr others with amounts like $1- $2 hiring the attorney makes it not worth getting justice. Is any of this on the radio? Not a fucking bit.
People are bad, Banksters, Oath Breakers and Criminals are good. Everything is okay. Fukushima is fixed, The Fish are fine, Seafood is great eat it up. Try some gmo corn, or gmo rice, gmo hfcs, oh damn 70% of people are FAT... hmmm. There's those shitty Monsanto, UN Agenda 21 Senators again. Vote Vote Vote Diebold Premiere SPAIN Instant Vapor Removal Counter, why bother to vote, oath breaking criminals are the only choice? The Constitution is gone, not one mother fucker in government isn't in prison? That's right they aren't the bad people. These aren't the bad people. The bad people is you drug addicted, unemployed, uninsured, sick fuckers, that's why we're putting the tanks in the streets, the drones in the air, hardening up your local cop show with cast offs. That's why there's some new organization which has replaced the constitution called DHS. But you'll laugh along with the puss stream media on that too.
won't you
that isn't a question, it's what you will do
Oh this just in, breaking news, those metal thieves again, Catalytic Converters, Copper wire, Plumbing, Street Lighting, they're on meth and police can't keep up with all these bad people who keep stealing less than $65 trillion. Oh yeah, firefighters are protesting cuts to their pensions, which were stolen by the TBTF, along with their mortgages and the rest of this fraud as a business model bullshit.
The oath that I took in the USAF, would put me directly in conflict with the current DHS . Now either my mind is scrambled, or somebody has fucked this country.
Just picture that the austerity measures taken by different European governments means that they will have completely dissatisfied government employees who will still have access to the same data that they had before.
The creative ways in which they use that power is a problem that will only get bigger.
For example, in Romania they have a system in which government employees feed information about pre-communist owners of buildings to their business partners so that they can buy the building rights from people who no longer live in Romania and who have no interest of going back but who still want to make a little bit of easy money. As a result most historic buildings and even parts of hospitals are being snatched up from under people who lived/worked there for the past 25-50 years and the scam artists are moving in.
Fear not citizen. The intimate personal data that we collect and store in perpetuity is perfectly safe in the hands of your government. It is protected form improper use/access and will be used only in a legal fashion, with court orders and warrants, only when absolutely necessary for the safety of our nation and you, yourself.
Don't resist our desire to collect and store this information. Resistance implies guilt. You don't want to aid terrorism and pedophiles do you? Besides, if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. You're not doing anything wrong are you?
Think of the children.
P.S. the captcha reads "foretold". How the fuck does it know?
And this is why I am against any sort of central medical database.
Yawn... this happens in the USA too. Anywhere you have personal records, there will be an employee who will access them for purposes other than intended. Do you think the people at the DMV haven't used their access to check on people that they have no business checking? How about the people that manage passports? There was that mess a few years ago.