Archive for November, 2007:
Written on November 27th, 2007 by adminno shouts
It would appear that the law on political donations has been broken. The labour party has been in receipt of large donations that had been made through intermediaries rather than being declared as coming from the originating donor.
The Prime Minister is claiming no knowledge of such transactions and Harriet Harmen the deputy Labour Leader is claiming a donation of £5,000 made by an intermediary to her deputy leadership campaign had been received in “Good Faith” . This rather suggests that the government take the view that it is a reasonable excuse to be unaware or to fail establish the full facts about things.
This is news to me. I have personal experience of the fact that Ignorance is no defence from a motoring offence where I was absolutely confident everything was legal and above board. Only an eagle eyed lawyer would have known otherwise and I am not a lawyer. Even the police were confused by the issue but ultimately, the law is the law and ignorance of it is no defence. I was found to be guilty even though I had no knowledge that I was committing an offence.
This being the case how can Harriet Harmen and the Prime Minister excuse acceptance of what would appear to be illegal donations and attempt to justify their own actions and the actions of their staffs and attempt to wriggle out of responsibility.
If you have a staff working on your behalf then you are responsible for the actions of that staff. We have seen just last week, the head of the HMRC resigned following the loss of disks containing data that that department was responsible for protecting. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor as minister responsible for that department have attempted to distance themselves from that mistake. Without question they are responsible for ensuring the protection of British citizens information held by the government. They certainly bear some responsibility as the paymasters and controllers of that department. They can at least argue they were not responsible for the day to day running of the department even though they are in overall control of those departments.
When it comes to their own parties and even their own political campaigns they have no excuse whatsoever. The law is the law and they have a duty and responsibility to follow it and there can be no excuse from people who have easy access to lawyers to claim ignorance as a defence.
It would seem, now more than ever before, we have a government which expects it’s citizens to be punished for not following the letter of the law but feels justified in excusing it’s own mistakes and errors.
There is only one word to describe that. Hypocricy. This from Gordon Brown who claimed to have a clear new vision of honest and open government? Oh dear.
Written on November 21st, 2007 by adminno shouts
The government has managed to lose two computer disks that contained the personal details of 25 million people. The information included names and address, dates of birth, national insurance numbers, bank account details and child benefits information. The Chairman of Customs and Revenue has resigned following this breach of regulations.
Alister Darling attempted to reassure concerned Members of Parliament and the electorate with the news that the government did not believe there was any reason to think that there was any criminal activity involved. Apparently a ‘junior official’ had downloaded the information onto two disks in Newcastle with the intention of sending them to another government department in London. The disks were prepared but never delivered and nobody appears to know where they got to.
This is a shocking breach of the most basic of data protection requirements. The questions range from how junior was this ‘junior official’, to how they were able to download the whole database and copy it onto disk. It rather begs the question how many other copies might have been produced in the past that nobody owned up to making or losing? Would such a loss have come to light if there had only been a few thousand names and details lost? Is it acceptable that governments demand our personal information and then appear to treat it as a mere comodity to be parceled up and posted to whoever they feel should have it.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that in this modern, internet, inter-connected age that it was necessary to post anything anyway. It may be that this is not considered a safe means of transfer being open to hacking so that may be a good thing that they don’t do it that way but surely they don’t post disks of private information all over the country all the time. The whole scenario is quite bizarre.
We must also wonder what else gets lost that doesn’t merit an announcement by a minister in the Houses Of Parliament. It is a scary thought that all sorts of private information could be getting lost every single day with no great fuss being made of it.
So what about the DNA database and the proposed ID cards? The government is committed to ID cards. It will be a bit of a problem when a few of those go missing, when copies are made or criminals manage to clone them.
The more centralised government becomes and the more detail that is contained in one source the greater the risk from criminal or simply stupid activity. This current breach clearly demonstrates that governments cannot be trusted with so much sensitive information nor do they have any clear idea how to treat that information.
Personal data is so valuable now that government departments should be taking more care of it than they would with money or gold bars. If ID cards ever do become reality it may well be that you will not exist, according to all the computer systems, if there is a problem with your card. It could mean you will be unable to access any government process. It could even mean that your bank accounts would have to be frozen because so much sensitive information would be contained on the card. You could potentially starve while your ID card problems were being sorted.
Any tool has both good and bad uses available to it. A knife can be used to help you eat and survive or it can be used to kill people. A gun can protect you or kill you. An Identity Card may be used to prove your identity but in the wrong hands could be used against you or lead to you being accused of things you had never done with you being left with little chance of convincing a jury that you were innocent.
Whatever the result of the investigation into this current data loss it seems inconceivable that the British Public will be prepared to trust the government with their personal data for a long time to come, if ever. Perhaps we have all been at fault in assuming that it was ok for governments to demand so much personal data. Current events demonstrate that they care a lot less about it than we do ourselves.
Written on November 5th, 2007 by adminno shouts
It has been announced that the Land Registry is to stop displaying the deeds of properties online. This follows concerns being very publicly broadcast on the BBC Radio 4, You And Yours program last week and an investigation by the Land Registry themselves.
There had been cases of people, particularly tenants, visiting the Land Registry website and downloading copies of the deeds and the owners signiture and they were then able to make copies of the signiture on forms sent back to the land registry to change ownership. It’s a shocking thing for anyone who it has happened to but these cases have only come to light when the ‘new owner’ has attempted to take possession for the house. If there were any patient criminals out there then it may be the case that a lot of people remain blissfully unaware that this illegal action has taken place. Presumably it could go unnoticed until the time they decide to sell.
There is another aspect to this too. Just getting hold of the details would be wonderful for any aspiring frauster or phishing artist and I am absolutely astonished that nobody thought about this when they decided to put the documents online. It beggars belief that no-one thought that putting peoples signitures online for the whole world to see was a dangerous and stupid thing to do. We are all told we should be careful with our private information. We are expected to shred everything that contains our private details to prevent it getting into the hands of criminals. Yet… the government, in the shape of the Land Registry displayed signitures to the whole world. Apparently they are going to stop doing that from next monday. Pardon? NEXT MONDAY? Not tomorrow, not today? Why not just pull the plug and take it all offline while they get this sorted. It really is astonishing how incompetent you are required to be to earn a fine salary and a gong at the end of your service. It’s good to know the government and the civil service are looking after us so well.
Thank goodness we have Gordon on the case. Actually, has anybody seen Gordon lately? Somebody has probably photocopied him and they will be taking over as our new prime Minister very soon.
