Politicians' honesty, ability questioned in data debate

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."

Darling countered that the ID card scheme is necessary to prevent data breaches. "The whole point of ID cards is to strengthen security so that we can be confident that information that is held on us, whether in the public sector or the private sector, is not released to third parties without our consent," he said.

Cable also raised issue with the NHS' Spine medical records database.

"I am told that some journalists are willing to pay £10,000 or something of that order for access to the medical records of a celebrity," he said. "The temptation for somebody to use and abuse the database in that way is obvious. Although there are disadvantages to a fragmented system in which GPs have their own records on paper, it is significantly better for security."

Earlier this week, a database of all UK children was delayed in order to re-examine security issues.

Politicians lack IT saavy?

But it was Labour MP Rob Marris who summed up what many in the IT industry and the general public are coming to believe is true of the government and politicians.

"As politicians, we have difficulty in coming to grips with the fast-changing world of information technology," Marris admitted.

He continued: "Part of the problem is the average age of members. Much of the information technology around us has come on to the scene while we have been adults. Most members can deal with e-mails, texting and spreadsheets, but we struggle with the process-the epistemology and methodology. The previous government struggled with that, and so have this government in the past 10 years."

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