Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Black Tuesday

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Gordon Brown's premiership has produced nothing but errors, evasions and excuses.

Just as some remote tribesmen fear that cameras and mirrors have the power to steal their souls, so the people of the modern world have come to fear that computers have the power to misuse and misdirect their most private data. Identity theft is a potent nightmare of the digital age, and it is with deep foreboding that we part with personal information even to departments of government that should, in a well-ordered democratic society, be the most secure of all repositories of it.

For HM Revenue & Customs to allow the National Insurance number and bank account details of a single citizen to fall into unknown hands would be a serious failure. For this monstrous ministry to mislay the details of 25 million citizens, many of them children, by the casual act of downloading the data on to disks and dispatching those disks to another arm of the bureaucracy by unregistered post, is a scandal of such proportions that its magnitude was only beginning to sink in as we went to press.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

Gervas Douglas

November 22nd, 2007 5:26pm

It is quite extraordinary that a junior civil servant could download such large volumes of sensitive data and then copy it all to a removable medium like a CD. This demonstrates major negligence with respect to the specification and design of the security features of HMRC's computer systems. The minister responsible at the time - our current Prime Minister.

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Diary

Penny Smith

Penny Smith gives a rundown of her week

The NHS needs its Reformation

The Spectator on reforming the NHS

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House