{"id":303,"date":"2007-11-20T20:34:50","date_gmt":"2007-11-20T19:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=303"},"modified":"2007-11-21T19:52:39","modified_gmt":"2007-11-21T18:52:39","slug":"pssst-anyone-want-a-cd-with-personal-details-of-25-million-people-on-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Pssst, anyone want a CD with personal details of 25 million people on it?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/7103566.stm\">What a monumental cock-up<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Two CDs containing names, addresses, bank details and other personal information, have gone missing in transit between HM Revenue\/Customs and the National Audit Office.  My information is on one of those CDs and so is data belonging to many people reading this.<\/p>\n<p>The Questions That Must Be Asked:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Why was the data not encrypted?  No-one has actually come out and said that it wasn&#8217;t encrypted, but you can be sure that if it <em>was<\/em>, then we&#8217;d hear &#8220;Relax, it was encrypted, no need to panic&#8230;&#8221;.  Instead, there have been references to &#8220;password-protected&#8221;, which I&#8217;m guessing is a euphemism for &#8220;insufficiently strong encryption&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Why did a &#8220;Junior official&#8221; have access to the entire Child Benefits database?  If this was the case, then an unscrupulous employee could easily sell this type of information on the quiet too&#8230; <\/li>\n<li>Why do these two government departments need to use the &#8220;CDs through the post&#8221; approach for data transfer?  That is risky, old-fashioned behaviour.  The data can&#8217;t actually be all that large: perhaps a few tens of megabytes.  Send it over a properly encrypted network connection and you don&#8217;t have to worry about CDs, couriers, transit delays\/loss.<\/li>\n<li>With this and the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/business\/7101132.stm\">Northern Rock<\/a> fiasco, how much longer will we expect Alistair Darling to remain as Chancellor?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And of course, there is a huge risk of a similar incident happening again with the proposed National ID Card Database, which is why it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.no2id.net\/\">must be stopped<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What a monumental cock-up. Two CDs containing names, addresses, bank details and other personal information, have gone missing in transit between HM Revenue\/Customs and the National Audit Office. My information is on one of those CDs and so is data belonging to many people reading this. The Questions That Must Be Asked: Why was the&#8230;&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=303\">read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}