In the UK, "every parent in the land" is at risk for identity theft now

The British government’s admission that it has lost the personal financial data of 25 million people continues to reverberate. The best synopsis comes from the Spectator (UK) Coffee House (emphasis added):

There were genuine gasps of amazement in the chamber when (Minister) Darling unveiled the scale of this disaster. If you have a child, and receive child benefit, your bank details are right now on the loose. Sort code and account number, together with your address and age of your child – details of 25m people in 7m families: every parent in the land. This data goldmine was downloaded onto two CDs on 18 Oct by a “junior official” (the fact that it’s so easy to do this is, is in itself, an outrage) and sent from HM Revenue Customs & Excise in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London (who say they never asked for such detail in the first place). The CDs never arrived. And no one has a clue where they are.

A couple of initial thoughts:
1) If I’m Gordon Brown, I tell my Labor party cronies to get ready for the next election in 2010 - and then pray the WBK War goes so bad that he can use the World War II precedent and extend Parliament past that date. Why do I say that? Check out this line from the Coffee House’s Fraser Nelson: “the British public (feel) . . . raw, visceral hatred towards this government . . . we have just witnessed Labour’s Black Tuesday.” The last line was a mirrored reference to the Conservative Party’s “Black Wednesday,” when market forces drove the British currency off the Exchange Rate Mechanism - a moment of spectacular economic mismanagement and political embarrassment that soured British voters toward the Tories and has kept them out of power in every election since.

Black Wednesday was in September of 1992.

2) While most reaction involving government policy has been to hail this is the “death of ID cards,” I think we may see a greater revulsion against government programs of all kinds. Keep in mind, this fiasco happened because the British government was collecting data for a public benefit for children - exactly the kind of entitlement program we have here for people of all ages. In this era of electronic transfers, data sharing, and identity theft, the government program that in the past meant “free” money with the vague concern of overreaching government now means an open invitation to becoming a victim of fraud.

Moreover, when the greatest enabler of said fraud is found to be the very folks trusted to keep the data secure, more and more voters may look at the next (or even current) set of entitlement programs the way Dr. McCoy viewed the Genesis project (Thinkers and Jokers):

Spock: “I do not dispute that in the wrong hands–”

McCoy: “‘In the wrong hands’? Would you mind telling me whose are the right hands, my logical friend?”

If I’m right (and that’s an admittedly big “if”), the welfare state may finally have met its match, and we’ll have an incompetent, lefty Labor government to thank for it.

Your (well, their) government at work, losing the personal data of millions

I can almost hear Leslie Carbone and Rick Sincere screaming in my ears . . .

From “across the pond” in the UK (the news, not the bloggers) courtesy of Brit Tory blogger Iain Dale (emphasis added):

I have a pensions policy and an endowment with Standard Life. I’ve just heard that the financial details of 15,000 Standard Life customers have been lost by HM Customs & Revenue. On top of this HM Revenue & Customs have lost more personal data in a much wider breach of security. It is scant consolation that the Chairman of HM Revenue & Customs has taken responsibility and resigned. I suppose it is too much to ask for a Treasury Minister to take responsibility too.

UPDATE: Unbelievable. They have lost 7.5 million records relating to child benefit. There has to be political accountability here.

To make matters worse, what wasn’t lost was sent via the mail to constituents (Dale again, emphasis added):

I’ve been contacted by someone who, a few weeks ago, wrote to their MP enclosing a copy of a CD containing confidential information about HMRC Tax Credit Office clients that had been sent in error by HMRC to him.

This person had called HMRC asking for a CD audio copy of telephone conversations they’d had with HMRC when discussing their Tax Credit award. HMRC sent them a CD not only with their recordings but with two hours’ worth of recordings from people right across the country containing bank details, NI Numbers, addresses, phone numbers, details of which schools people’s children went to etc.

I’m told the MP forwarded the letter and CD to a Minister asking if they could ascertain if this was a more widespread problem within HMRC. So far, no reply has been forthcoming.This seems to be further evidence that this misuse of public data is widespread within government.

If HMRC has breached the Data Protection Act then presumably they can be held liable in the courts - by 15 million people… The mind boggles.

As one would expect, it has become a major scandal in Britain, where the Labor government (now under the control of Gordon Brown, and thus a barren field for Bush-haters) is trying to force all Britons to carry national ID cards (on that, Dale chimes in: “Today marks the death knell of identity cards” - I hope and pray he’s right).

Dale has quite a few other witty observations on the debacle (here, here, here, here, here, and here) - and for those counting, the number of Britons affected by “lost” data now stands at 25 million (Conservative Home) - but the best quote so far comes from this Dale post:

Ronald Reagan once said that the most frightening sentence in the English language is . . . Trust me, I’m from the government and I’m here to help. Never a truer word spoken, especially today.