Laptops are regularly stolen from service station car parks, and its usually sensitive stuff, from documents marked secret, to police intelligence records, to NHS records, even medical records involving the Royal family.
This will continue, people in general do not have any clue about IT security, because they are not IT specialists- their job is to use IT for their work as a tool not to consider policies and risks.
When they put in a system that is secure, you find that the users can’t get it to work for them, they forget passwords, they delete important data and cant get it back, all manner of careless things.
The current project to link all the courts, to prisons and probation services is called C-NOMIS. They have spent £150 millions, and its estimated that to get it into any sembance of working order will cost over £900 million, and when you look at the cost overruns of big government IT projects, there is no reason to expect that figure to come in at less than £2 billions and every reason to believe it could exceed £4 billions.
This is a system that affects maybe 500 thousand to one million people, this system was the reason behind the merger of the DCA, Prison Service and Probation Service, at absolutely incredible expense, but it is already acknowledged that the system will never work as intended.
This may not seem relevant, except that the national ID card system will in effect be a multilevel multiuser access system across many government agencies, such as police, tax, benefits agencies, even wether the holder is entitled to health services and so many others.
It will record data on 70 million Britons, and probably many millions of undesirables from other countries too, I have little doubt that US agencies will want access too - since they already demand access to British credit records.
Think of the number of users this system will have, how it will be extended to incude other functions and then try to imagine that every one of those users will be diligent and hard working, that not one of them will be corrupt and not one of them will make an error, that not one of them feels they are underpaid, that none of them will be sympathetic to criminals of some terrorist group.
Think of the possiblities for fraud, for selling on forged identities and for state abuse of the rights of the individual.
This thread is about two lousy discs, and the agency concerned managed to screw that up, just multiply that by a factor of several thousand - that’s the UK national ID card system for you.
