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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.'"
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.
Ugh? You are aware of what country Obama is president of right?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
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?
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Mrs May, you and your departments can piss off if you think you getting any more my info!
How are you going to stop them?
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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.
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've seen greater ignorance. When the government's plans to increase surveilance capability were announced, a lot of people blamed the Queen.
I have come to the conclusion that it isn't the politicians that are the problem. Its the Civil Service. Governments are just a passing inconvenience to them, all the policies floated by the last government that were called out as being hated by the people are steadily being re-introduced by the current government. It seems that the reforming Tories in power actually have no power at all. So there is no point ranting at an individual politician because they may as well not be there for all the good it will do.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
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 !
I blamed the queen for signing the RIP Act. She is supposed to be a last-stop constitutional safeguard, who can reset the system if the government goes completely hatstand. She didn't.
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...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.
But it would have to be taken away with the consent of the electorate. I suspect a speech by the queen about why she refused to sign RIPA would have resulted in a lot of MPs looking for a new career...
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One might posit that weak politicians (of all parties) who are unable to stand up to civil servants are a bigger part of the problem. Somehow the skills that seem to be required to get elected (and, as importantly, selected by a party to stand for a seat) just don't seem to include this skill set.
It's that way in the U. S., too, and worse. And a lot of our public sector workers are unionized which means they're nearly impossible to fire. They demand more money and benefits from the politicians who are more than happy to oblige them in exchange for union campaign donations. Most work for 25 years and then retire with big pensions and cushy benefits.
Until we get a handle on that we're screwed.
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UK: How high?
That's how "special" the relationship is...
You forgot the appropriate converse: UK: Ok, now you jump for me, old pal. US: Shove it.
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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.