UK Prisons Ministry Fined For Lack of Encryption At Prisons

Bruce66423 (1678196) writes The Guardian reports that the UK Information Commissioner has levied a fine of £180,000 on the Ministry of Justice for their failure to encrypt data held on external hard drives at prisons. The fine is nominal — one part of government fining another is rather pointless, but it does show that there's a little bit of accountability. Of course it's interesting to consider the dangers of this hopefully old way of storing backups; but the question of whether we do a lot better now is quite pointed. To make matters worse, one of the unencrypted backup hard drives walked away.

Pointless accountability?

[cforciea]

The fine is nominal — one part of government fining another is rather pointless, but it does show that there's a little bit of accountability.

It seems like the two clauses of that sentence are contradicting each other. How does a "pointless" fine show any accountability at all?

Re:So... outsource ALL OF IT

[ruir]

No matter how incompetent civil servants you have, they will save you a lot HELL more money than those money grabbing machines now as Oracle, SAP or Microsoft. By a couple of orders of magnitude.

Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud.

[LWATCDR]

" The fine is nominal — one part of government fining another is rather pointless, but it does show that there's a little bit of accountability"
  in the voice of Sir Humphrey Appleby.
No minister it is not pointless at all. You get to show that their is some accountability at no cost to the government in monetary terms. The error will be shown to be a problem with a contractor that is following his original contract instead of the new updated rules so no one in the civil service will be held responsible and in the end nothing really will change and we can get on with the business of running the government.