Data Protection

[Ken L]

What's interesting is that the part of HM revenue service that deals with child benefit has recently been stripped to the bone and radically re-organised in line with some whacky American management philosophy called "Lean".

What will be interesting is whether the inevitable public enquiry (AKA Whitewash) identifies these changes as a relevant contributing factor to this debacle.

I wait with baited breath to see what the result is because it's my own department that is suposed to be next in the fireing line for this madness.

 

In the meantime, had I got kids, I would be VERY concerned.

[Ian FG]

Disks in the post? Can you believe it? Anyway, the biggest risk (apparently) is if you are receiving child benefit and you have used any of your kid's names as passwords or their birthdays as pin numbers in any of your bank accounts (or any other accounts), you need to change them quickly.

[barry luxton]

Did someone mention sometime fit for purpose. That springs to mind, how apt.

[five bellies]

I think Camerans Christmas has come early,The Torys are going to dine out on this one, It seems to me that we are watching a Goverment that is begining to fall in on its self.

 

Andy mentioned somthing that I thought, how could you store the details of 25.000,000 families on two discs. or are they speacial ones? if that is the case would they not need speacialist kit to run them and secondly are they password coded ?

 

there is a lot more to run on this travesty I believe.

[gozzer]

I think Camerans Christmas has come early,The Torys are going to dine out on this one, It seems to me that we are watching a Goverment that is begining to fall in on its self.

 

Andy mentioned somthing that I thought, how could you store the details of 25.000,000 families on two discs. or are they speacial ones? if that is the case would they not need speacialist kit to run them and secondly are they password coded ?

 

there is a lot more to run on this travesty I believe.

 

Reports say that they're password protected FB, but depending on who's got them, I wouldn't think they'd be too hard to access.

 

They also say they were sent by 'internal' mail, so I can't understand how they can't work out what happened.

 

John.

[Elton]

Nice to see the police are getting involved.

 

I'll bear that in mind next time some of my post goes missing.

[barry luxton]

Nice to see the police are getting involved.

 

I'll bear that in mind next time some of my post goes missing.

Anyone notice the police were called in only after two weeks, if some one nicked something off me the first thing i would do is call, POLICE

 

Wonder if that was something to do with no publicity.

Edited November 21, 2007 by barry luxton

[Lid]

25 million records should fit on two DVD data discs easily, especially if they are compressed. (Tools like Winzip can usually achieve something like 80% compression). However as well as being password protected, the files should have been encrypted to an acceptable security standard. From what I can gather, they were not, so the password is worse than useless to any security hacker worth their salt.

Edited November 21, 2007 by Lid

[Elton]

To be honest, everyone is fearing the worst, but what's the betting that:

 

a. they're simply lost in a depot, or

 

b. some delivery driver has swiped them, thinking he's got his hands on a bit of black market porn, and then binned them when he realised that he'd have to stick with late Channel 5 documentaries for a while, anyway?

[Big Jeff]

What Elton just said plus

 

C. Stuck in someones in tray and they never got sent in the first place.

 

 

Joking apart - Government these days is more about being able to manage and administer rather than policies and Ideas. This lot are attempting to rip the guts out of the machinery and still deliver.

 

The public expects our civil servants to work in an ever changing workplace:

- with not enough colleagues to do the job

-with crap equipment (software etc)

-to deliver and administer whatever current target the political master has thought up.

 

Being a civil servant is not easy. Yes they have a fairly sercure job with an outstanding pension but the money is not great and working for this shower of sh**e makes moral at rock bottom.

 

Just have some simpathy for the poor sod who has been thro' hell and back over the last few weeks.

 

Jeff