Government staff are misplacing their security passes at a rate of 23 a day, it has emerged. Almost 17,000 civil service passes have been lost or stolen over the past two years. Around two thirds of the misplaced cards have been misplaced by staff at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The figures follow a series of other security lapses by civil servants, including an incident where highly sensitive intelligence files on al-Qaeda were left on a train by a senior Whitehall official. In January last year, a laptop with the details of 600,000 people on it was taken from a Royal Navy officer’s car in Birmingham, and in November 2007, two CDs with details of 25 million Britons were lost after being posted from a Revenue and Customs office in Tyne and Wear.
This government cannot and should not be trusted with our personnel information. All this latest incident does is demonstrate the serious issues around data security should National ID cards be introduced.
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But it's not the MOD or a Navy Officer or some civil servant working in a tax office who will keep the ID card data is it? It's the Identity and Passport Service who keep it. And the public do trust them to keep personal data safe. Anyway, it's not 'should ID cards be introduced'. They've already issued more than 10,000 of the things. They're already here.
ReplyDeleteThe issue is not so much who looks after the data as the challenge of keeping such a large amount of very sensitive personal data safe. Time and again different agencies have proven themselves open to failings and imperfections.
ReplyDeleteThe government's plans need to be seen in the context of a raft of other measures which - Liberal Democrats believe - pose a serious threat to our privacy. Moreover, the cost of the ID scheme proposed by the government could pay for an extra 10,000 police within our communities.
Which would people prefer and is more likely to help protect ordinary citizens? We think it is the latter.