This was in today's Technology Grauniad:
So, they've at least learnt from the CDs getting lost in the post - if they still send the stuff in an insecure way, they will destroy it when it gets there!
Linky.
The sound of two dropped CDs is still echoing around the government's £14bn-a-year IT programme. And the effects are already being felt: last week the NHS IT agency Connecting for Health warned hospitals not to post discs containing unencrypted personal data to the central NHS Tracing Service, run by a private contractor in the Midlands. Media not meeting security standards "will be destroyed upon receipt", it warned.
Linky.
"It became expected practice to pitch prices for initially completed tranches of work relatively low, in the confident expectation that later revisions and extensions would create negotiated contracts of between four and six times the initial competed contract price." It's only a short step from there to demanding £5,000 to "strip" sensitive personal information from the child benefit data - a task that, with a properly designed database, would take no extra effort. That HMRC is charged so much extra for elementary tweaks shows how weak the government's grasp of its own IT has become.
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