The Wardman Wire

This week’s hot issue has been on the first page for much of the week. It focuses on Alastair Darling and the loss of the the personal details of more than 25 million people through the downloading, writing to CD, and posting of this data. This is issue is large enough to even force the Prime Minister to apologise .

Said to be a mistake made by a junior civil servant, though apparently with the knowledge of his superiors, this has put the families whose details are on the two CDs in serious risk of being victims of fraud, if they fall into the hands of criminals - with the potential rewards for getting hold of the information in to the billions of pounds. This looks especially bad when the CDs were not encrypted, and protected only by a password - something which could easily have been done. But why so much data sent when the National Audit Office wanted only some of it and not the sensitive stuff? To save about £5,000.

Questions have also been raised about whether Alastair Darling can survive as Chancellor for much longer, considering the number of bungles and examples general incompetence occurring, or at least emerging, under his tenure.

This issue is a big issue for us all - what precautions are the government taking with the personal details it requires of us? And this is one question that many blogs have dealt with , including this one.

Events, dear boy…

Sometimes life’s a bitch to politicians. You just can’t help but feel sorry for poor badger-like Alistair Darling. He really is under severe pressure, and mostly down to issues that aren’t really under his control. There is little he could have done to prevent this issue arising, really, since no minister can be aware of everything that goes on in his department. But unfortunately for him life’s a bitch, and when civil servants make mistakes it’s the politicians who get the blame. No matter what the issue is. The people of Britain are beginning to want to see a head roll, and the Conservatives have caught the scent of blood, and are going in for the kill or to at least cause a bad wound. Can Darling survive? Most likely. But this will undermine confidence in the government, even though it isn’t directly their fault.

Is this, as has been touted, New Labour’s Winter of DISContent [sorry for the pun]? Not yet - but like the infamous Macmillan quote: “Events, dear boy, events”, suggests there is just no way of knowing what might happen next.

Tags: child benefit data loss, data protection, data security, hmrc, inland revenue, alistair darling, gordon brown

[tags]child benefit data loss, data protection, data security, hmrc, inland revenue, alistair darling, gordon brown[/tags]