That is the description given by the Times today to the Government's ability to have lost the personal details of 25 million UK citizens. The personal details of 25 million recipients of child benefit (it is not income-tested therefore it will affect all ranges of income earners) were sent by unregistered post on non-encrypted CDs by a low-level bureaucrat at the Tax Dept to HMRC Standard Life HQ and they went missing.
These details could easily be used to withdraw money from personal accounts and used fo other identity fraud. Already the opposition is trashing the Govt's proposed ID card scheme in both principle and now also in application. This is a huge blow to voters confidence in Gordon Brown's Govt - perhaps the fatal blow.

As far as I know I have not been affected. With Governments like this constantly collecting our information for its socialist policies, who needs criminals!

"Second-class and lost in the post

If this Government is incompetent enough to lose millions of personal details, is it safe with anything?
Alice Miles

November 21, 2007

Idiots. Utter, unbelievable, jaw-dropping, unpardonable idiots. It is beyond farce, past comprehension, criminally irresponsible and beneath contempt.

All those lectures from government and authorities about keeping our personal data safe; every statement ever made about the security of the proposed NHS database of everybody's personal medical records; each claim that the Children's Database containing all their personal details will somehow make our kids safer; and of course each and every promise about the safety of the national identity register — exposed as quite, quite worthless. Because as soon as you put it on a computer, a bloke in an office can download it and stick it in an envelope and send your most personal details and mine and our children's across the country with a dodgy courier.

It is shocking, it is risible, it is hilarious. Someone gave a disc containing confidential data about 25 million people to a bloke on a bike? And he lost it? Of course, a case of mass identity or financial fraud would never happen in this way. It is too chaotic. Fraud will happen through a far more organised infiltration of the official systems; but what yesterday's revelation does is underscore the insecurity of those systems. And allows us to giggle at the po-faced pretence of those in authority that they are any better at protecting us than we are ourselves.

This is the pretence at the heart of every state attempt to tighten up national security — through searches and ID cards and barricades and banning water in airports and making us take our shoes off. All these measures put the public to ever-greater inconvenience while it knows that terrorism happens through random and unimaginable acts that no amount of searching and barricading can block."

Second-class and lost in the post.