Politicians' honesty, ability questioned in data debate

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The identity card scheme, departmental processes and politicians truthfulness and ability to handle technology were all under discussion at a lengthy debate about data security among MPs at the House of Commons yesterday.

The debate was sparked by the massive data leak from HM Revenue and Customs, admitted by the government last week in a speech to the commons by Chancellor Alistair Darling.

Data breach details

Yesterday's verbal scrum was kicked off by Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborne, as he questioned the accuracy of the chancellor's statement last week, which admitted the breach and said it occurred because of the actions of a junior member of staff and that the banking community backed the delays.

Osborne said those details had been brought into question by National Audit Office (NAO) emails released last week, which suggested senior officials did indeed have oversight. He added: "Those are not junior officials or lowly clerks - 96 per cent of the staff of the Revenue and Customs are on more junior grades than the most junior civil servants involved in this decision."

Osborne also questioned the government's belief that the discs were still likely to be on government property.

Darling asked for MPs to wait until the first report from PricewaterhouseCoopers before passing judgement: "It is absolutely essential that we deal with the facts and the evidence, and we will have an interim report containing those in three weeks' time," he told MPs.

Darling gave little in the way of an update on the police investigation, saying there was still no evidence the discs had been taken by criminals and that banks have so far reported no increased fraud attempts on the affected accounts.

Liberal Democrat Dr. Vincent Cable suggested the worth of the discs could be as much as £1.5 billion - a frightening statistic given the data was transferred in full form in order to cut costs, according to the NAO emails.

"I understand that one identity on the black market is worth approximately £60. We are therefore considering a stock of criminal value of around £1.5 billion, which makes the Brinks Mat robbery the equivalent of stealing the church collection," Cable said.

Darling confirmed that the discs were password protected, but not encrypted. "Most people agree that the data ought to have been encrypted, but they were not," he added. Last week, security experts from around the UK criticised the government for not making use of the right protective technologies and procedures.

Government databases questioned

The opposition continued to call for the government to scrap the ID card and national identity register plans.

Osborne said: "Given that the government have shown themselves to be completely incapable of looking after the data they already hold on us, how can they possibly ask for any more? I know that the government increasingly look like a Monty Python sketch, but should they not take a leaf out of Monty Python's book and just say, "ID cards are no more. They have ceased to be. They are an ex-project"? The sooner the government wake up to that fact and stop wasting our money on this doomed white elephant, the better."

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