Criminal blunder as UK government loses 84,000 prisoners

By Davey Winder
Friday, 22 August 2008 15:51

Home IT

The UK Home Office has admitted that a memory stick with the data concerning every single prisoner in the country, all 84,000 of them, has managed to escape. Of course, this being the UK government, the data was not encrypted...

The UK government has not, let's be honest here, got the best track record when it comes to safeguarding the data of its citizens.

Things really started going pear shaped when it managed to lose two discs containing information on 25 million people claiming child benefit back in November 2007.

Since then, matters have not improved despite the huge media outcry at the time and promises to ensure such blunders could never happen again.

In December the same year over seven thousand drivers from Northern Ireland discovered that information about them had been lost. The next month the details of 600,000 military personnel were left on a laptop that got stolen from a Navy officer.
 
Back in June a total of six laptops were stolen from a hospital, along with the data concerning some 20,000 patients held upon them. And in July the Ministry of Defence put its hands up to admit to the astonishing fact that 658 laptops had been stolen in the last four years.

Now, in what almost sounds like the start of a very bad joke, the Home Office has admitted that a memory stick has escaped from the grasps of a consulting firm along with the details of every single prisoner in the UK.

The kind of data includes names, addresses, dates of birth and even the release dates of prisoners. The data was not encrypted.

Greg Day, Security Analyst with McAfee told us that "this latest data loss incident clearly highlights the challenge for businesses when sharing sensitive information with third parties, whether that data is being transferred electronically by email or carried around on storage devices such as USB sticks."

I would suggest is clearly highlights that the UK government is simply crap at protecting sensitive personal information and cannot be trusted to do so.

Leader of the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg, told the BBC that the "government will no doubt seek to blame private contractors, but the rash of data losses over the last two years confirm that there is something much more worrying at stake: this government cannot keep any information safe."