UK PM Admits Government Data is Never Completely Secure

By Greg McNevin

November 5, 2008: UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been remarkably frank in the wake of yet another embarrassing data loss incident, admitting that personal information will never be completely safe in the government’s hands.

The statement follows the revelation that a memory stick containing information allegedly giving access to tax and benefit records was lost in pub carpark by an employee of Atos Origin – the IT firm managing the Government’s Gateway website.

The website handles the tax affairs and other issues related to Government benefits of 12 million users and businesses a month, and was taken offline as a precaution despite the Department of Work and Pensions adamantly stating that the data on the memory stick was encrypted and there was no chance records could have been accessed.

As the incident is the latest in what is becoming almost a weekly occurrence, the PM has promised to again tighten data security policies, although as the Atos employee broke clear company protocols in putting the data on the flash drive, this may have little effect.

“I think it's important to recognise that we can't promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings,” said Brown.

If it is at all possible after the multitude of embarrassing data loss incidents in the UK over the last year, the incident further undermines confidence in the Government’s ability to secure the personal information of its citizens, and even without Mr Brown’s candid statement, it highlights the fact that no matter how much data security is tightened, human error remains a potent threat.

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