Daily Mail 2nd November 2008
Gordon Brown today admitted the Government cannot promise to keep safe the millions of pieces of sensitive personal information it has gathered on the British public.
The Prime Minister's remarks came amid an urgent inquiry into how a memory stick with user names and passwords for a key Whitehall computer system was found in a pub car park.
The Gateway website allows members of the public to access hundreds of government services including self-assessment tax returns, pension entitlements and child benefits. 
There are 12m people registered on it, and it had to be temporarily suspended.
It is the latest in a string of similar blunders, including the loss of the details of 25m Child Benefit claimants, and information on tens of thousands of the country's worst criminals.
More...
* Tax website shut down as memory stick with secret personal data of 12million is found in a pub car park
Mr Brown said: 'It is important to recognise that we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings. Mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like the communication of information.'
MPs said the Premier's admission called into doubt the wisdom of pressing ahead with plans to massively expand the amount of sensitive personal information held by the State.
Both major opposition parties said the £4.5 billion ID cards scheme should now be scrapped.
Other major projects include a £12.7bn NHS computer programme for the electronic storage and transmission of patients' records, and ContactPoint - a database containing sensitive details about every child in the country, due to be launched next year.
Plans are also being drawn up for a central database holding details of every phone call, text message, email or website visited by every person in the UK.
Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: 'This is yet another reason why the government should abandon their £20bn ID card project - something that will do nothing to improve our security but, as is becoming increasingly apparent, may put our security at risk.'
Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said that Mr Brown - by blaming the losses on 'mistakes by human beings' - was guilty of an 'abrogation of responsibility on an enormous scale'.
Mr Booth said the real issue was the Government's policy of collecting vast amounts of personal information on members of the public, to be shared among Whitehall departments.
The Gateway memory stick was lost by subcontractor Atos Origin.
The firm said there had been a 'direct breach' of its procedures. It was found in the car park of the Orbital Pub in Cannock, Staffordshire, near to where the company firm is based.
A spokesman said the 'misplacing' of the stick was being taken 'very seriously'.
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: 'An inquiry is the right way forward, but it is certainly not a substitute for the use of proper procedures in the first place.
'I would have thought the basic security step would be to ensure that memory sticks with all this information on simply don't exist. Why should we trust the Government with our details for its database or ID cards system when they simply cannot be trusted with information? These data losses are becoming almost weekly.'
It has also emerged that a public official is sacked or reprimanded almost every working day for data protection or other personal information breaches.
Parliamentary answers received from four Government departments alone reveal that at least 230 officials were disciplined or dismissed in the last year for inappropriate handling of sensitive data.
Analysis of reports of data breach notifications reveals the Government has lost the personal information of nearly 30 million people in the last year.
Tory shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said: 'It underlines why plans for a national ID register and a new huge central database of phone and email details by are flawed and fraught with such risk and danger.
'The Government's record on handling our information has been an utter disgrace. Much greater emphasis and importance must be given to data security procedures by public bodies.'
Mr Brown said Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell was sending out fresh instructions to ministers over how sensitive data must be handled.
He added: 'This recent case with a private company, where information about individuals has been lost, makes me even more determined that we will root out this problem about leaving things around.'
A spokeswoman for the Department for Work and Pensions said the memory stick contained data for 'only a handful' of people, and all their passwords were encrypted.
She added: 'We are taking this issue extremely seriously and a full and urgent investigation is under way. Our absolute priority is the security of data. While there was a question mark over the data on the memory stick it was absolutely right to temporarily suspend the Government Gateway.
'Having looked in detail at the stick we are satisfied neither the Gateway nor members of the public have seen their security compromised and the Gateway is online again.'
No comments:
Post a Comment