Late last year, HM Revenue & Customs succeeded in losing details on 25m Britons. That was quite an impressive achievement; the loss of data on disks, unencrypted, had an almost artistic quality about it. It was glorious to watch BBC rottweiller Jeremy Paxman reduce some hapless junior Treasury minister to dogfood on the BBC Newsnight programme. (The Chancellor, Alisdair Darling, was too busy dealing with the disaster of Northern Rock to go on the show). As Paxman argued by way of a statement more than a question to the hapless government minister (I forget her name, she is totally forgettable): “This does rather kill off the idea of ID cards, doesn’t it?”
It certainly does. And alas, my wife this morning received a letter from HMRC to inform her that details she sent to it in relation to her business (I will not give any further details for obvious reasons), have all been lost: date of birth, registration numbers for VAT, the whole shebang. The letter informed us of the need to be super-vigilant about bills, invoices etc. We will have to use services like Equifax or Experian, the credit-check companies, to ensure that our credit history is not damaged. All a great nuisance. I am also writing to my local member of Parliament, Mark Field (Conservative), who voted against ID cards to his immense credit, to inform of this latest case. About 40 or so forms, according to the letter sent to us, have been lost in this latest HMRC cockup. I will ask Field to raise this matter as part of the Tories’ opposition to ID cards. There is, of course, no point informing anyone on the government side about this.
Or is it a cock-up? I wonder about what is happening at the moment. If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks – which increasingly operate like state departments due to the amount of regulations these days. The recent massive fraud that hit Societe Generale, the French bank, was, remember, carried out by at least one, if not more, insiders who had knowledge of how the compliance operations of these complex organisation work. Or, it is possible that someone in HMRC has an agenda against ID cards and is using incidents like this to discredit the whole project.
Anyway, whatever your views about ID cards and government use of data, I strongly urge people to use credit-check and verification services at least once a year to ensure they have a clean bill of health. In the current difficult credit market environment since the US sub-prime mortgage disaster, even the smallest blemish on a credit record could cause an individual serious problems, such as inability to get a loan.
Bastards.
Nah; we won’t be so lucky as to have someone helping against ID cards from the inside. Just apply Coyote’s Law:
“When the same set of facts can be explained equally well by: a massive conspiracy coordinated
without a single leak between hundreds or even thousands of people; or sustained stupidity,
confusion and/or incompetence; assume stupidity.”
One data-loss incident could be the work of a friend of Liberty, but there have been more since then; assume stupidity.
You might indeed wonder if there are criminals employed in the Civil Service. I would have thought that anyone employed in the Civil Service is, ipso facto, a criminal.
Take a look at some of the big time career criminals who took decades to bring to justice. Some poor Chave doing a little bit of moonlighting from his council house will get screwed every time,but the career criminal can live in a mansion and a have a dozen cars and the powers that be don’t lay a finger on them.
Teachers have to jump through hoops to get a job,I doubt if the Civil Service has the same vetting procedure.
Well I would elect to deal with career criminals
rather than the HMRC, who, if you have had any dealings with them… Well Johnathan’s description of “Bastards” is putting it mildly!
A hopefully heartwarming tale for you all. Absolutely true, I swear it.
Some years ago the HMRC decided that my wife and I owed them oodles of money that we did not. We thought we could prove it, and coorespondence passed back and forth.
My wife had our entire file on the matter in her briefcase which she left on the back seat of the car, whilst doing some shopping in a less than salubrious district of Bristol. She was only gone ten minutes, but , yes you guessed.When she got back the side window was broken, and the briefcase gone.
There was absolutely nothing of value in the case, except the paperwork.
Oh Fuck!
Well we informed HMRC of the theft and requested that they send back copies of some of the vital evidence we had sent them, that we were relying on to prove our case.
I got an almost snort of pleasure from the other end of the phone. They claimed to have “Misslaid ” our documentation and would we like to pay up the amount they demanded and stop mucking them about, or they would double it!
Well it looked like we were screwed!
Two weeks later a parcel arrived. It was from the thieves!
It contained all our vital papers (no covering note natch!) The thief had obviously read the docs and realised what a hole we were in, and had taken the trouble to return it to us!!
Yep give me an honest freelance thief anyday, than a Government one!
I had a letter from the MoD saying that my details were on that laptop that got nicked last month. Cheers guys, thanks.
Relatedly, a friend of mine who works for HMRC says the latest theory is that the CD was never sent; the guy involved only claimed it was sent to cover his arse.
RAB: holy cow, that one is certainly in the too-good-to-be-true department!
Rubber Tomahawks to you Madam!
Look if I was that imaginative a writer, I’d be on strike in Hollywood right now!
All absolutley true ! I assure you.
Or if one were a Libertarian conspiracy theorist, one could argue that repeated data loss/theft was a Government conspiracy to conveniently show the absolute need for ID cards. But then, they wouldn’t do that, would they?
You have a point there:-)
Talking about databases, it looks like Le Grand idea of licenses for smokers will be next on the list. The Guv have said next year they’ll be “consulting stakeholders on the next steps in tobacco control” i.e. ganging up with their cronies to do what they all intended to do anyway.
So, not just another revenue stream (at least a tenner each from around 1/4 of the adult population, undoubtedly it’ll be more) but every smoker on a nice database, just fine for refusing healthcare, housing, benefits too and swiping the children as the need arises, imposing extra taxes, etc. No need to guess who the dhimmis are now, they’ll all have a number! Great.
Marvellous.
Apparently the odious nonjobber Le Grand calls himself, get this, a “libertarian paternalist”. A quick google shows this to be a fabby new idea from the redefiners of the human language in the progressive movement. Apparently each of us has a good person inside who wants to do what the government wants, and a bad person who smokes, eats cakes, drinks beer, etc. Like the angel and devil on the shoulders in movie comedies, just like that. So libertarian paternalists “liberate” the good angel by paternalistically suppressing the bad devil. Apparently this is libertarian. You couldn’t make it up. Anyway, looks like the word libertarian has been stolen as well now.
Fabulous.
I recommend these people:
http://www.annualcreditreport.co.uk/
I know the senior management and they have an entirely proper attitude to the whole data-sharing horror show, unlike certain hand-in-glove-with-gov credit reference agencies. (That’s not “horrorshow” in the natsat sense.)
They make money as a credit broker, by recommending appropriate products based on your record. The whole thing is admirably transparent. (In the interests of which I sould point out they have plied me with sandwiches at the IoD but never paid me a penny.)
Or if one were a Libertarian conspiracy theorist…
Believe me, I’ve heard every kind of conspiracy theoretical crap about the ID scheme and HMG’s data (mis-)management from every conceivable political quarter. I thought libertarians (no capital L, surely) were sufficiently rationalist to be the least likely to come up with it.
What do people find so hard to grok about the reality that the world is a shambles?
Big organisations are not parts of a machine but lumbering herd-beasts, following the leader sometimes, but easily distracted by juicy-looking daisies. They are run at a strategic level in the pursuit of the convenience of their management cadres, but don’t intend (or care about) most of the consequences of their actions, and have almost no control or foresight of individual significant occurrences – the Black Swans, or Poisson events, depending on your degree of pretension.
Conspiracy, as conspiracy theorists imagine it, is as omniscient and omnicompetent as the equally imaginary administrators are in the theories of the planned economy. Real conspiracies are small, and usually go wrong. Organisations, secret or overt, are as competent as the most stupid or inattentive person in a position to screw up impressively.
It should definitely not be assumed, however that there are not enemies of the database state in the Whitehall machine. Both for good, decent reasons, as individual civil servants may be people who do respect the lives of others, and for venial or empire-building reasons, where it conflicts with what is done now or collective or personal goals.
I have always suspected the Treasury may hate the ID scheme to the extent that it makes the Home Office, not the Treasury, the master department.
“you might start to wonder whether there are criminals working in civil service jobs or major banks”
If you believe everyone employed in government service is , and will always remain, pure and incorruptible – well, I have bridge I’d like to sell to you.
Good administrative arrangements take the possibility of insider criminality into account and limit the amount of damage any one individual can do. The scandal of the lost HMRC discs is not that the disks were lost, but that it was possible for anyone to dump the whole data base onto disc at all.
The primary way to protect the public from misuse of data known to the government is simply for the government, and its employees, honest and dishonest, not to have the data in the first place.