The missing CD's

[Paul]

WHY are the government using TNT. to Deliver
Like bbc News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7110547.stm

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7110547.stm

The search for the two missing discs containing the details of 25m Child Benefit claimants has moved to a number of depots of courier company TNT.

The computer discs went missing after being put into the internal post at HM Revenue and Customs in Tyne and Wear.

Police are now focusing on premises of TNT, which delivers HMRC mail, after completing inquiries at HMRC's offices.

A spokesman for TNT confirmed that its premises in London had been searched on Friday night.

He said it was impossible to say whether the CDs had ever entered TNT's system.

"We are all working on that theory, but it cannot be proved one way or the other," he said.

Raising fears

The missing discs hold the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16.

The data on them includes the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people.

The discs were intended for the National Audit Office (NAO) in London, but never arrived from HMRC's office in Washington, Tyne and Wear.

See sequence of events in the lost CDs scandal

Police looking for the discs completed their search at the Washington HMRC building on Friday night.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman confirmed searches had now started at TNT buildings, but would not say at how many or reveal the locations.

A core team of 47 detectives from the Specialist and Economic Crime Directorate has been involved in the search operation.

The TNT spokesman said the sender of the CDs had used the firm's general mail service rather than its facility that allows customers to monitor the progress of deliveries.

However, TNT was fully co-operating with police, he said.

He said the firm carried up to 100,000 items of mail each night on behalf of HMRC, and also had contracts with other government departments and bodies.

'Failure of duty'

In March, officials at HMRC began the practice of downloading the entire Child Benefit database onto CDs and sending them through the internal mail to the NAO for auditing.

The practice came to light only on Tuesday when it was revealed two discs had been lost - raising fears data protection laws had been broken.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown told MPs he "profoundly regrets" the loss of the records and he apologised for the "inconvenience and worries" caused to families.

He said the government was working to prevent the data being used for fraud.

But Conservative leader David Cameron said the government had "failed in its first duty to protect the public".

On Friday, it also emerged that the NAO had handed unencrypted discs containing details of all Child Benefit claimants to accountants KPMG.

The NAO said they had been delivered by hand and returned safely.

Meanwhile, accountancy firm Grant Thomson has warned that the loss could be repeated if plans to reshape HMRC, including "slashing its funding and staff", continued.

Francesca Lagerberg, head of the company's tax office, said the "hard-pushed" department was "being asked to provide more for less".




Timeline: Child benefits records loss
Two CDs containing personal details of 25m people have been lost by HM Revenue and Customs. Here is how the crisis unfolded.

MARCH 2007

A junior official at HM Revenue and Customs gives the National Audit Office a full copy of HMRC's child benefit data, in breach of security procedures. That information is later safely returned.

SEPTEMBER

Records of about 15,000 people's details go missing after being sent by HMRC to Standard Life. Also in September, a laptop containing around 400 ISA (individual savings accounts) customers' details is stolen.

18 OCTOBER

Child benefit data is again sent to the NAO by a junior official, using the courier company TNT, which operates the HMRC's post system. The package containing two CDs, containing details of 25 million individuals, is not recorded or registered and fails to arrive.

24 OCTOBER

The NAO tells HMRC it has not received the package. An HMRC spokeswoman said the official believed it may have been delayed by the postal strikes or in the NAO's office move and did not report it. A second copy is sent, again in breach of procedures, but this time it is sent by registered post and arrives safely.

8 NOVEMBER

Senior HMRC management are informed that the 18 October package is missing.

10 NOVEMBER

Alistair Darling is informed and tells Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Mr Darling orders an immediate investigation and searches of all premises where the package might be, as well as action to ensure it does not happen again.

12 NOVEMBER

Mr Darling is told by HMRC that evidence has been found which might help to find the missing package.

14 NOVEMBER

The chancellor decides the HMRC searches have failed and tells HMRC chairman Paul Gray to call in the Metropolitan Police.

15 NOVEMBER

The chancellor goes to Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, who agrees that remedial action must be taken before a public statement is made.

12-18 NOVEMBER

Mr Gray tells Mr Darling he feels he should resign. The chancellor seeks the advice of the Financial Services Authority and Serious Organised Crime Agency, while banks are alerted by HMRC.

20 NOVEMBER

Mr Gray resigns following an announcement that Mr Darling is to make a statement to the House of Commons. The chancellor outlines what has happened and announces an investigation of HMRC's security procedures by PricewaterhouseCoopers chairman Kieran Poynter, alongside the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which monitors the HMRC.

21 NOVEMBER

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologises for the "inconvenience and worries" caused and orders security checks on all government departments. The Conservatives produce e-mails they say show senior HMRC officials approved the downloading of the entire Child Benefit register - including bank details - on to discs to save cash.

22 NOVEMBER

HMRC writes to seven million families to reassure them that the missing data is "likely to still be on government property". The government denies the personal data was put on to discs at the request of senior officials.

[andy2007]

This case, is yet another providing evidence of the lax security precautions in Government Departments. It is particularly worrying, not just because of the risk to 25 million people. But because of the increasing amount of personal information the Government is collecting about us.

Particularly when there is still talk of ID Cards, and DNA Databases. I for one have NO CONFIDENCE in their ability to avoid this type of information falling into the wrong hands. Or being edited by Criminals to divert attention from themselves, by making it look like they are someone else.

[terrace]

getting worse-6 more discs go missing!

[norbet colon]

[k979aaa]

It nice too see alister darling doing all he can to find the missing disc's.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Health workers info lost in Scotland

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2 ... land/7925/

EDINBURGH, Scotland, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Documents with the names and private national insurance numbers of 200 Scottish National Health Service workers were lost by government officials.

Details surfaced Friday regarding a package containing pension statements for NHS employees that was lost in transit in October, Scotland on Sunday said.

"It came to light (Friday) that one package of printed pension benefit statements dispatched from the Scottish Public Pensions Agency to NHS Greater Glasgow is currently not accounted for," the Scottish government said in a statement.

It is the first known private data issue in Scotland, though it follows the release of other information regarding 25 million people through a postal error.

Officials had not yet notified the NHS employees involved.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... oms525.xml

The trail stretches for 320 miles, through 13 vast mail depots and two post rooms. For 11 days, more than 100 officers taking part in Operation Oakdale have been searching for a hand-written, sealed envelope containing two CDs.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," said a police source. "All we can do is take the haystack apart piece by piece."

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, revealed on Tuesday to MPs that the two CDs, containing sensitive information on 7.25 million families claiming child benefit, had gone missing. The mail should have been sent by registered internal post, which would have made it possible to pinpoint its location at any time.

Acting Assistant Commissioner Janet Williams, from Scotland Yard's Specialist Crime Directorate, a former Anti-Terrorist Branch officer who is heading the search operation, sent a specialist police search team to the offices of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in Washington, Tyne and Wear, where a junior official says he put the package in the internal mail system.

By yesterday, police had searched the offices of HMRC and of the National Audit Office (NAO) in London, where the package should have arrived. The hunt has switched to the depots of TNT, the courier company which handles up 100,000 items of HMRC mail every day.

The Sunday Telegraph has established that on October 18 the package should have been collected from the HMRC post room by TNT and taken to its depot in Co Durham and then transferred to one of TNT's three national "hubs". From there it should have been driven to one of TNT's nine London depots, from where it would have been delivered to the NAO's post room.

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinio ... _thief.php

GPS IN England have been fussing, as doctors will, over confidentiality. For a government that strives to be modern, efficient and cost-effective, this is tiresome, to put it mildly. Ministers have come up with a can't-fail, couldn't-possibly-go-wrong scheme to transform the NHS and practitioners' working lives. For thanks, they are threatened with a boycott. Some nonsense to do with privacy, apparently.

The government isn't asking much. It wants merely to put the records of 50 million patients - stop me if this sounds familiar - on a single electronic database. What could be the harm in that? Yet the quacks are muttering about hackers, blackmailers, and sundry unauthorised officials helping themselves to information. As every sensible person knows, such things hardly ever happen.

The system, part of the very cost-effective £12.4 billion earmarked to modernise IT within the NHS, would be known - George Orwell being unavailable for comment - as "the Spine". Apparently calling it the Bladder would have given entirely the wrong impression. Yet of 1000 GPs contacted by Medix, the healthcare research organisation, three-quarters said the database would be informationally incontinent. They said it would leak. Copiously.

Some 59% of the doctors also said they would be unwilling to upload information without a patient's specific consent. You find that an unexceptional restatement of the basic relationship between doctor and patient? The government believes that you, along with the GPs, are being silly. In order to squeeze the maximum efficiency from the new database, it wants to upload records automatically unless, and only unless, there is a specific objection.

That probably seems logical to people who can think in binary: not saying no equals yes. It may even seem rational, too, to any government that defines consent as the absence of dissent. When you are in the information-mining business, such considerations matter.

Computers are logical, therefore a reliance on computers is logical. Computers rely on data, therefore those who rely on computers must procure data in order, at all costs, to safeguard reliability. Incomplete data - thanks to sceptics, privacy nuts, curmudgeons and anti-social elements - threatens other data. Ubiquity is, as it were, all. Universality is, so to speak, everything.

Besides, computers are so quick, so cheap, and such fun. You can burn a couple of discs for the National Audit Office and still find time for a couple of games of Solitaire. If the perfect logic of your computer, and the security of 25 million people, is thereafter compromised by cheap postal solutions, political mismanagement, and suspect human software, you can always review the situation later. Even for HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), it is important to ensure that the impossible doesn't happen twice.

That hints, though, at the first thing worth observing about the fiasco of the child benefit records: the more the blind appetite for information increases, the greater the scale of the inevitable catastrophe. Once upon a time, a couple of letters might get stuck down the back of a filing cabinet. Now, with gargantuan ambitions come gargantuan failures. Thus: 2111 "breaches in security" within HMRC during the last year alone. Thus: the Department of Work and Pensions posting out 26,000 letters, with 26,000 sets of bank details, to the wrong people. Thus: 41 laptops, containing who knows what, stolen from tax officials in the space of 12 months.

Reading a stolen disc - for which, handily, passwords are supplied as routine - is much better than grabbing a pile of non-sequential banknotes: there is no paper trail, no electronic trail, nothing. But that inspires a second thought about the latest (only the latest) debacle. When did we become saddled with the fantasy that computer-dependent systems are, or can be, secure, as in bank-vault secure?

Governments fall prey to dodgy software just like you and me, the difference being that their bugs cost billions. Governments have their security compromised, just like you and me, but we tend not to demand a say in 25 million lives.

Incompetence matters, but motives matter more. Clearly, if you are distributing public funds in the form of child benefit some information is essential. That does not explain why governments have taken to treating all information as essential. Nor does it explain why supposedly essential data is treated in such a cavalier, even contemptuous, fashion. "Terrorism", that increasingly threadbare excuse, is no answer. The official assumption that we have no worthwhile rights in the matter, and certainly no important say, is much more plausible.

They are entitled to demand. We are not, or not without a fight, entitled to refuse. Such is the basis from which the information obsession flows. It is mimicked, increasingly, in ways both fatuous and disturbing, by all manner of piddling organisations and enterprises who regard the surrender of intimate details on demand as no more than their due.

The point is that the people, high and low, who screwed up within HMRC clearly did not believe they were behaving in a way that was either idiotic or outrageous. Information, and the lives it represents, comes cheap. In such situations the politicians, equally, are mortified by crass inefficiency, not by what was once known as the principle of the thing. Grotesque carelessness with private information matters far less, in terms of public safety, than a desire to acquire unlimited quantities of information in the first place.

All last week, the government's critics were asking if ministers and their minions could be entrusted with our most intimate details. The proximate topic was HMRC, obviously, but the real issue was ID cards. Trusting souls assumed that the government would think again. Even hardened sceptics spoke as though the child benefit mess, at once simple and vast, was an IT debacle too far for an administration apparently hell-bent on inflicting computing disasters on every arm of government.

The technically-aware, meanwhile, reminded us that text burned to a disc is one thing, biometric records of your eyes, fingerprints and the like quite another. They are unique to individuals. If they are once put at risk there is no remedy. Yet these, supposedly, are to be the basis of ID cards and a system wider in scope than anything a democracy has dared to contemplate, at a vast cost to be borne by you, me, and the foreign-looking gentleman who just happens to have been born and raised in Britain.

In this, as in so many things, we don't trust the government and its agencies. That's healthy. Everyone has stories about the alarming, wholesale absence of simple competence. But these are the lesser evils. Would you feel better if they perfected their data harvesting?

The point about ID cards is not that they won't work (though they won't), nor that no-one in government can even agree what they might be for. The point is the sanctity of the person, the inviolability of identity, and liberty versus a bureaucrat's definition of greater good.

People worry, reasonably enough, about their carbon footprints. I'm more concerned these days about what I call my virtual footprint. Like most people, I hand over personal information almost daily. In return, I want a simple principle re-established: the information is mine to give, not theirs to take. The burden of proof has to be reversed. They have to tell me who wants to know, and why.

If not, and if they press on with ID cards - as they will - the agents of the state will have another criminal subversive on their hands. After last week, I don't think I'll be alone.

[norbet colon]

It's interesting that the ultimate in a long line of New Labour Cock -ups was mentioned in that article .We've already had Passport Agency & hundreds of pounds lost in a NI screw up with the social.

New Labour got someone from the same management training school as Allan Leighton , a very aggressive Richard Granger taken on in Sept 02 @ £250,000 pa , he speaks in Management Speak & responded to accusations of bullying as "a range of behaviours attuned to what's necessary to achieve things" WTF ? +"Pressure for change " , likened the BMA to the NUM , he accepted a very substantial reduction in pay & allowances joining the dept according to Ivan Lewis . Very Public Spirited ?.
,
He used the very Leighton-esque suppliers were huskies that could be shot in front of the other dogs if they went lame and fed to the other dogs if necessary.
He could also spin it like Leighton , anyone who criticised the programme was to be banned from NHS work for 10 years . Computer magazine hacks were physically blocked from Hutton's press conferences ." A £2.3 billion overspend is not large ", when things got disasterous he brought in a PR firm's crisis management specialist team.

The bit about the spine is a good point , there's no evidence that centrally held records accessible anywhere in the country are centrally needed , a GP campaigning against the system said there's information sharing mechanisims like er, e-mail , phones & faxes .

800 children's hospital outpatient 's data went missing in 2006 ,The Guardian did a cut out coupon to send to Nurse Ratchet if people wanted to opt out , Patronising Pat told all the coupon fillers they'd no chance unless they'd "unique & personal reasons for claiming substantial & unwarranted distress " WTF ? . Chief Medical Officer Donaldson said if anyone wrote to their GP wanting to opt out of the records system , the GP had to forward said letters to the Dept of Health .

It's not just bent politicans and dodgy software which had to be replaced or backed up with old fashioned pen & paper , there's been bent Enron style accounting ,the ISoft Chairman & Directors made £28 & £20 million in insider trading share sales . One got a £550,000 pay off , bit like Elmer Toime with RM ???only for "misstatements "not "personalty clashes " .The National Programmes supplier BT did well , £700,000 bonuses for a IT Chief & £2 million in bonuses for a CEO.

That money wasted due to political vanity , incompetence and vested interest would have paid for 26,000 doctors ,65,000 nurses ,every hospital built since 97 three times over rather than dodgy PFI deals to balance Gordon's books , the record NHS deficit 23 times over , all those too expensive cancer & alzheimer's drugs for 200 years and reverse 20 years of Social Care cutbacks .

This is typical B-Liar though , the adoring overgrown public schoolboy trying to hang on the coattails of parasitical management consultants than listen to medics ,as long as he got his bumper initiative.

There was no analysis of the NHS"s true needs ( sounds familliar?) but his Toniness & Government Ministers went for big announcements , spin & deceit , very predictable and very New Liebour .





The sooner the CWU is shut of that shower & it's hangers on , the better , the RMT & FBU did it ! :lfo &