UK Prisons Ministry Fined For Lack of Encryption At Prisons 74
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.
Re:stealing identity (Score:2, Interesting)
One word: Pension
The US, UK, Canada and many other countries have an old age pension system that are all very easy to exploit if you have the number. Crooks amass multiple numbers and then collect the pensions. The system is very lax and doesn't check whether someone who claims to be 104 years old is really still alive and at least looks like he is 104 for example.
Whenever you hear of some Romanian peasant who reached the ripe old age of 120, it is simply because he adopted the identity of his parent, buried the parent without informing anyone and happily collected his parent's pension ever since (and eventually his own too).
Re:So... outsource ALL OF IT (Score:2, Interesting)
Outsourcing is the main problem with modern British government, you stupid fuck. Profit motive means doing the MINIMUM work for the MAXIMUM personal gain - it is the very opposite of what you need in a prison system, where pretty much none of the humans are informed, rational, voluntary actors.
And changing providers every few years just to suit your stupid ideology eliminates the efficiency of experience.
There is almost no British government function that has been improved by outsourcing, and IT projects are the worst in this respect, reaching insane budgets and always under-delivering (in some cases this is good because the citizens would not benefit from the project, e.g. Universal Credit or shared health records). Please take your religion and find a sound-proofed church to preach it in.