The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted that 121 USB sticks, including five containing secret information, have been lost or stolen since 2004, in the British government’s latest embarrassing data breach .
The figures were released in response to an official question from Sarah Teather, a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, and are the latest in a string of British government data gaffes. The MoD’s missing USBs follow the loss of two disks containing welfare information on 25 million U.K. citizens, not to mention the loss of a bewildering array of laptops and mobile phones.
“Far from the problem getting better, it seems actually to be getting worse at the moment,” said Teather. “I think that the government has a duty to come clean and say whether or not anyone has been put at risk as a result of this – we need reassuring, for example, that none of our troops have been put at risk.”
The British government’s latest storage snafu comes less than a year after Her Majesty Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which is the U.K’s equivalent of the IRS was at the center of the country’s largest ever data loss.
The U.K.’s latest data loss heaps yet more pressure on Prime Minister Gordon Brown at a time when his government is pushing on with a controversial plan to implement national identity cards.
”The government are going ahead - to build this giant database for ID cards, and to put all this information into one format,” said Teather. “How can they expect us to trust them to keep our personal information safe in their unnecessary and expensive ID card scheme?”
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Thats a damn fine question...that deserves a real solid answer.
In the commercial world, a customer can decide to stop shopping @ a location / company that has been found to handle data insecurely...but what if that "company" is your own federal government?
What recourse do customers (i.e., citizens) have then?
What would be interesting to know is how many of these Laptops or USB sticks were encrypted. There are plenty of vendors selling encryption products which they claim is used by the MoD.
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