Last Updated on: 9th December 2015, 05:07 pm
Here I go again, ragging on Britain. But in this case, I think they deserve a whole hell of a lot more.
A junior official decided that the best way to send two computer disks full of the bank account and personal info of every British citizen receiving the child benefit, i.e. every family in Britain, i.e. 25 million British people, between government departments would be to a. not encrypt the data, b. not track it, and c. hand it over to a bike courier. Anybody see where this is going?
Those disks have now mysteriously disappeared, some British officials are resigning, and the Prime Minister is “profoundly regretting and apologizing for the inconvenience and worries this has caused millions of families.” Uh, inconvenience and worries? That’s kind of like saying that a few people died when the Titanic went down.
They say the police are involved, and there’s no sign of criminal activity…yet. But that’s a big yet. Let’s hope and pray, for the sake of all those families, that the disks are lost in a dumpster somewhere, now unusable, keeping all that info out of the wrong hands.