That's fucking stupid

I was going to start my first post on here with a complete list of all my personal information. I was going to post my name, address, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, bank details and of course inside leg measurement. I didn’t because despite the fact that my details are already out there; if I was defrauded it would be partly my fault whereas now I can squarely blame the government for their relentless stupidity and carelessness with my data.

Over the last year the government in the UK has managed to lost pretty much everyone’s data. If you have a pension from Standard Life then chances are HMRC has lost your data; if you have a child and claim child benefit then HMRC have almost certainly lost your details. I am a child of a member of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and we get no better treatment, my details are out there in the wild along with the details of learner drivers, benefits claimants and pensioners.

A little while ago the Nationwide building society lost a single laptop which was thought to maybe have contained some personal customer data. The Nationwide held their hands up to the fact that they had not taken *every* step to secure the data which may or may not have been on the laptop so copped a cool million pound hit to their wallet. A one million pound fine and the damage to the reputation of Nationwide was enough to spur most financial services companies to look at the marginal cost of implementing full disk encryption on laptops and palmtops and to ensure that sensitive data was encrypted before it was put on CD or sent over the Internet. This was not enough to prompt the ‘untouchable’ government, who believes itself to be above the law, to take similar measures and so a culture of carelessness pervades and there is nobody to blame other than junior civil servants who are sacked quietly or senior ministers who apologise and then do nothing to rectify the situation.

The solution is simple: if a minister is responsible for a department then he should be confident to bank his salary and pension on his abilities, the rest of us do. Where gross misconducts take place like the loss of sensitive data or an outsourced project over running and going massively over budget then the minister responsible should be sacked from the ministerial post and his government pension fund should be refunded to the taxpayers.

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