Every day there is a fresh news story in the UK, involving yet another distribution of government-held personal data. It’s getting to be too banal to even merit anyone’s attention any more.

Here’s a good comment by “Anonymous Coward” on one of the many Register posts about the UK government’s apparent capacity to randomly distribute its citizens’ personal information like so many drops of water from a lawn sprinkler.

“why they can’t spend some money on a centralised database to which their users can gain access from anywhere, like we in the real world do, is beyond me.”
Prime your irony glands.
Having spent a number of years around central government IT, I imagine it’s because any IT project which involves accessing sensitive data from the big, scary internet (regardless of VPNs etc) becomes so tied up in security accreditation and arse-covering that it never gets anywhere.
So people work around the bureaucracy by copying data to laptops.

The ring of truth there, I suspect.

On the bright side, these incidents are making even the generally gullible UK public pay a bit more attention to the security issues of a national ID database. (Ironically, the whole data vacuuming-up scheme is supposed to be there to improve national security. ROTFL, LOL, 😀 🙂 – insert irritating net smileys here, at will.) If public concern for civil liberties hasn’t raised much successful opposition, even the Daily mail readers’ sense of self-preservation might work.

The government’s accursed ID card project seems to be getting deferred ever further into the future and, with luck, let’s hope it will get quietly dropped.