http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/22/europe/britain.php
Data on 84,000 British inmates goes astray In the latest of a series of security breaches involving sensitive government computer data, a private consulting company working for the Home Office has lost a memory stick containing personal details on all of the 84,000 prisoners serving time in England and Wales. The incident has caused fresh embarrassment to the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which is facing a deep slump in opinion polls. The succession of data losses, including an incident last year in which two computer discs disappeared in the mail with personal details of 25 million people involved in the government's child benefits program, have been help up by opposition parties as emblematic of wider government incompetence. The loss of the memory stick with the prisoners' details was first reported to the government this week by a London-based management consultancy, PA Consulting Group, which had a contract to track the movement of offenders through the criminal justice system. Home Office officials said Friday that the prisoners' details had been transferred to the consultants in encrypted form, but transferred by the consultants in unencrypted form onto the missing memory stick, an action the officials said appeared to be a breach of government rules. The government said the missing data included the names, addresses and expected release dates of all the prisoners in England and Wales, whose cases are handled directly by the Home Office, as distinct from prisoners held in the separate jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and Scotland. The 84,000 prisoners involved constitute the largest number ever held in the Home Office system, which has been struggling for years with severely overcrowded jails. Also on the memory stick, the government said, was other sensitive information taken from the national computer system run by Britain's network of police forces, including the names, addresses and dates of birth of 30,000 people with six or more criminal convictions in the past year. Other data on the stick involved personal details of 10,000 prisoners regarded as "prolific" offenders, and some limited details, involving initials only, of prisoners in drug treatment programs, the home office said. The loss of the data was especially awkward for the government in the light of two wide-ranging reviews of its data security systems that were conducted after the previous data losses. The most serious of these, in numbers of people effected, was the loss in November of the discs from the child benefits system, which carried banking details of many of the 25 million people involved. That incident raised fears of widespread bank fraud and led to the resignation of the head of the government's revenue and customs agency. Opposition spokesmen described the latest incident as redolent of a data security system, in government and in the private sector, that needed a wholesale overhaul. David Davies, a prominent Conservative party lawmaker who has made a crusade of his opposition to the amassing of large amounts of personal data on Britain's 60-million citizens on government computers, said the loss of the prison data raised the risk of costly demands for compensation by prisoners. "Who is going to meet the legal liabilities, and the costs, of this?" he said. ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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