Will ID Cards be scrapped now PM admits data security is a myth?

By Davey Winder
Wednesday, 05 November 2008 04:03

Home IT

As the UK Government continues to prove itself incapable of protecting citizen data, so critics of the proposed National ID Card scheme continue to argue such a Big Brother database will always be insecure. Now British Prime Minister Gordon Brown would seem to have finally admitted as much.

A memory stick containing the passwords, security software and source code for the UK Government Gateway online system was found in a pub car park after being lost by a staff member of a consultancy firm working on the gateway project.

The UK Government is no stranger to data loss, some examples of which have been so huge as to truly beggar belief. This latest example is just the icing on a very insecure cake.

The Government Gateway is a central website which allows citizens to register by providing personal information such as their National Insurance number, credit card number, address and so on.

Once registered they get access to more than 50 Government departments and hundreds of services online. So far in 2008 1.8 million people have submitted online tax returns this way, for example. Other services include VAT returns, benefit claims and even payment of parking tickets.

After the announcement of the memory stick loss, the Government Gateway site was forced to close temporarily as an emergency measure to protect the details of millions of UK citizens. The site has since opened for business once more.

The loss would appear to be down to an IT Analyst employed by consultants Atos Origin which won a UKP £46.7 million contract to manage the Government Gateway project in 2006. It seems the worker downloaded the data to the memory stick in violation of company security best practise rules.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted in a statement that "we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe" because of human mistakes which he clarified as being "mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like the communication of information."

Many MPs have now said that this should herald the scrapping of the proposed UKP £4.5 billion plan to introduce compulsory national ID cards for every citizen as it places enormous doubt upon the ability of government to properly protect such sensitive and confidential data.

In a double whammy of political embarrassment, the Government Minister whose department is responsible for the Gateway project, James Purnell, has had to apologise after it was revealed he managed to leave a 'red box' containing confidential documents on a train!