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Nine sacked for breaching core ID card database

By Angela Harbutt
August 13th, 2009 at 1:25 pm | Comments Off on Nine sacked for breaching core ID card database | Posted in UK Politics

no2idThe government has always poo-pooed the idea that holding our personal information in a single database will make it vulnerable to abuse by those (hundreds of thousands) who have access to the system.

Henry Porter’s blog points to why we should be VERY concerned about this issue (regardless of where we are, or not, on implementation of the ID card scheme).  Its already happening ! Council employees are illegally accessing personal information on celebrities, their friends, their girlfriends and themselves.

Henry’s source – Computer Weekly – has reported that nine people have been sacked for accessing personal information  from the core ID card database. The nine were “among 34 council workers who illegally accessed the Customer Information System (CIS) database, which holds the biographical data of the population that will underpin the government’s multi-billion-pound ID-card programme.”

The others were either reprimanded or resigned though note than none (including the sacked nine) were prosecuted.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg as many of the breaches were discovered after “sample checks”. Samples are just that – samples.  There may be many more breaches that have gone undetected as the CIS is a database accessed by over 200,000 government employees.

The Government reaction was typically complacent. A DWP spokesman said “the small number of incidents shows that the CIS security system is working…” As Henry points out, they did not, of course, acknowledge that these cases came from sample checks generated by the system. They clearly have NO idea how many government employees are accessing our data illegally. And they clearly dont think that theft of our personal information merits prosecution.

Herein lies the problem. The government has yet to acknowledge that information about me is mine. If someone helped themselves to money out of my bank I would expect to see them prosecuted. If someone helps themselves to my personal information i expect the same. I also expect it to be protected adequately by those holding it by the way.

If ever anyone thought that we had “won” the battle on ID cards they should think again. We still have a very long way to go on this one. Good work Computer Weekly. Excellent post Henry Porter.

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