Ministry of Justice loses data on 45,000 people

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has reported that around 45,000 people were affected in nine separate data loss incidents.

The worst single incident was in June 2007 when 27,000 people working for department suppliers were affected after information from badly protected electronic storage devices was disclosed without authorisation.

Names, addresses and bank details were taken, with no efforts to notify the people involved after the MoJ judged it didn’t need to do so from risk assessments.

The second most serious incident occurred in January 2008 when 14,000 people were affected due to a badly-protected laptop being stolen from secured government premises. Names, dates of birth and some national insurance numbers was among the information.

The other six incidents either involved the loss of laptops or paper documents.

The losses were highlighted in the ministry’s latest resource accounts and had all been reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2007-2008. The department had to reveal the incidents as part of he Government’s commitment at the end of last year to cover information risk management in its annual reporting.

Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman David Howarth MP said to the Telegraph newspaper: “Yet again the Government has shown that it cannot be trusted with citizens' personal data."

"How can ministers possibly argue for the introduction of a universal ID card scheme when they can't even keep safe the data they already have?”

The incidents are the latest in a long line of cases where government departments have lost personal data.

IT PRO has already reported on Ministry of Justice data losses - back in January, four court disks containing addresses of victims and witnesses were taken. However, the worst government incident is still the 25 million records lost by the HMRC in 2007.

It also comes a week after IT PRO revealed government plans to keep a record on billions of examples of text, email and browsing records.

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