The great data disaster of 2007

[Dave Birch] Half way through the Digital Identity Forum yesterday, the session chair announced (hot from his Blackberry) that the British government — specifically, the Child Benefit Agency — has lost the personal details of every parent in the country and as a result someone has resigned. I haven’t had the energy to try and figure out why on Earth in 2007 government departments would be posting CDs to each other rather than using PGP or S/MIME on the interweb, but there you go. Anyway, by this morning there was an identity theft media frenzy never before witnessed in our green and pleasant land. I woke up to breakfast TV in the hotel and every channel was leading with the story. I’ve just seen the Chancellor of the Exchequer being interviewed on Sky and I actually felt sorry for him: some of the questions were ridiculous (eg, won’t the fraudsters wait a few years before they obtain credit cards in our children’s names). For a more measured response, see here: Forum friend Ian Brown was whisked away from the Digital Identity Pub Quiz to appear on BBC’s Newsnight.

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I’m not panicing, of course. For one thing, the government has set up helpline (0845 302 1444). Phew! For another, any dedicated identity fraudster desperate to get hold of Child Benefit Records would have done so already and the chances of them having been stolen by opportunistic identity thieves is (to my mind) slim. If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d bet that the missing CDs are down the back of the metaphorical sofa somewhere. This is not to minimise the issue: personal details shouldn’t be being passed around in the clear. But the chances of anyone being a victim of identity theft because of this kind of data breach (if it was a data breach), frankly negligible. The biggest victim, in my opinion, will be the UK’s national identity card that is just about to go to procurement: I imagine their press office will be busy today.

Some background for our foreign visitors: for reasons not entirely clear to me, the British government sends you cash every week if you have children. This is called Child Benefit. In order to waste as much money as possible, instead of simply raising the tax threshold for me and my good lady wife, the government takes the money away from me each month and then sends most of it back to my bank account via the Child Benefit Agency, which is part of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It was a junior person at the Agency who took all of the records, put them on two CDs and posted them to oblivion.

These opinions are my own (I think) and are presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]