A Tale of Two CDs
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Security on November 23, 2007 at 11:25 am
There are some questions I haven’t seen asked about the two missing data disks and more pertinently, the data held on them.
Why was the data posted in the first place?
For a start, I’d like to know why they were sent by snail mail. With such small amounts of data, either 2 CDs or 2 DVDs depending on which paper you read, why wasn’t the data sent electronically? Surely the government has fast and secure data links between their offices. With modern encryption and compression and even just a modest ADSL uplink it wouldn’t take long to send the data.
How was the data sent to the Government?
Did the information get sent to the tax office in Tyne and Weir from EDS on optical disks as well, if so why didn’t they deliver it direct to the Revenues and Customs department who asked for it in the first place?
Or did Tyne and Weir have on-line access to it? If so why didn’t the HM Revenues and Customs have access to the same data. I thought we had paid EDS gazillions to organise this.
Whose data is it anyway?
EDS wanted to charge more for extracting data specific data rather than sending the whole files. Does that mean they control access to our – the UK’s data?
I know that 25 million are a lot of entries but the size of data involved is little more than we generate and work with every day. With the ‘lost disks’ we aren’t talking about a huge amount of different types of files or a lot of large individual entries (such as images in a photo library), just the same sort of data: name, address and a few numbers.
Presumably it was going to cost someone at EDS a pile to select the relevant fields and save the data to disk. Let’s be fair and say maybe an hour or two or perhaps as much as a morning to include team meetings, coffee time, getting in late and going for an early lunch.
Or are EDS’s databases so clunky they can’t easily extract data and their computers so slow it takes them days to save it to disk?
Who were responsible for the courier transportation?
My first tongue in cheek guess was TNT, see here. Surprise, surprise, it was TNT who lost the data.
I know where they are
From personal experience I know the disks are in Bay 50 at TNT’s Crawley depot.
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