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Do you think there might be a bigger issue about how frightened, suspicious and paranoid our society is becoming?

Dear Newsnight

Question re the Football tonight, what side will hard pressed communities across Europe be supporting tonight?

It would be interesting to hear some comments tonight from people in Europe.

no England team = no yobs?

best wishes
Bob

we do not elect airline pilots, we do not elect surgeons we do not elect accountants yet we elect people with no proof of competence to the highest office in the land.

If we elected airline pilots merely on the basis of popularity then planes would be falling out of the sky.

is it not time that anyone who seeks to stand for office must demonstrate some proof of competence in administration?

to improve and safeguard our society we need to end the cult of amateurism in govt by a regime of training and certification?

Why does the media seem so dense? Did Gordon Brown make those foolish investments for Northern Rock without checking them out himself? Was he the one who lost the discs or did he hire the person who did and give him authorization to have access to them? He was barely on the job as prime minister, how was he supposed to have prevented them. This is the same kind of imbecile mentality which said President George Bush lied about Iraq because his decisions may have been based on flawed intelligence data gathered, assessed, and presented by career intelligence professionals. In all likelihood the discs were not stolen but misplaced. I think this turned out to be the case some years ago when a Chinese physicist was held in solitary confinement for around a year because it was thought he stole a disc with the plans for the W-88, one of America's most secret weapons and gave it to the Chinese government. What's a real blunder? A B-52 mistakenly flying two thirds of the way across the US a few weeks ago with three cruise missiles under its wing armed with nuclear warheads. I think 60 heads will roll for it.

WHY would the NAO would ask an IT department for so many personal records?

Hi Newsnight

sorry me again,

one of the keys to this is the person who sent out the discs, I'm very concerned about the personal pressure they will now be under and it is absolutely essential that the pressure is taken off.

What has happened could have happened to any member of staff high or low,

I really hate this blame culture we now have, whatever you do find someone to blame instead of working the problem,

another sign of our national decline, I suggest people of all sides take responsibility and STOP seeking to blame, the opposite of leadership, or those who aspire to leadership,

back to the individual concerned I hope they are being looked after? Perhaps Newsnight could look into this?

best wishes
Bob

So you ask Clegg and Huhne about irrelevant euro membership, while this revised EU Constitution treaty looms and they - like the government - are unjustifiably going back on their election promises for a referendum?

*And* allow them to get away with posturing about 'decentralisation' while supporting passing ever more decision-making to the EU.

What on earth was Jeremy thinking?

The media is a vital check and balance in our democratic system.

You really have to get MUCH better than this, and skewer such blatant hypocrisy, if there's any hope of restoring faith in politics and getting our representatives to perform better.

Re Data Protection etc

Questions that need to be answered.

Why was the Audit Office being sent the data, what where they going to do with it

Does this breach the Data Protection Act (DPA)

The problem is not simply that the procedures were not followed but that there were no checks and balances to ensure that this could not happen ( no bank could have such a sloppy proceedure and get away with it)

All individuals who were identified on the disk with bank account detials should de minimis, have the number of all their bank accounts changed: the cost of this should be borne by teh Government as part of their 'fine" under the DPA

There is a catalogue of data problems at the HMRC which they have not learned from including theft of lap tops and other data disks. Re LAPTOPS - why is dats stored on these laptops when out of the office. If my stock broker visits me at home he has virtually no data on his laptop but access information via a web link. Why not HMRC?

It is virtually impossible to prevent fraud in a financial institution of you have 2 or more people determined to do wrong; but you can make it very difficult and you can have as ystem which flags a loss very early - not weeks after the event!

All this and HMRC want to penalize (via a time limit) us next year if we do not file our tax returns on line.

Given the semi - guarantee that the Government has given about losses associated with this loss of data, what is the consequence for the 'Golden Rule' given low tax inflows last month, Northen Rock funding etc. Can we get an estimate of the cost of these 2 disasters?

if a 'junior' member of staff is able to dump 25 million records onto 2 cd's then how can anyone be sure this has not happened already and the 'junior' member of staff has walked out with it.
The people saying that the 'junior' member of staff 'broke rules' are incredible. the junior member should not be physically able to copy this data , it should be impossible ,the fact that it is not impossible is evidence enough that the data is not at all secure

Bear with me.

"Suppose the disks had 'turned up' two days later - would we, or the PM have heard about it? Does it matter?"

I think a good political piece might be on the big picture - what are the required competences to govern in the 21st Century. (Clue: It's no longer good enough to have an Oxbridge law degree, followed by 4 years at the bar and the revolving door of a local or london borough council.)

The government needs to have people who understand business, you understand how systems, and understand technology, and more importantly understand that the rules of what can be done have changed.

From all the incumbents one sees interviewed, one sees there are a small number of MPs who get it, but a vast amount who don't. (And the ones who do, would immediately see that copying CDs is a trivial task; HMRC might have got their disks back, but the information could still have been stolen.)

The increasing need for government ministers to rely on 'advisers' and 'tzars' means that the wrong people are in the job.

And, ironically, despite being mostly lawyers, for most senior MPs it seems that 'ignorance' ('of the law'?) *is* a defence when it comes to keeping one's own job.

Let me add to your list: fiasco over the Scottish elections organised by Douglas Alexander; fiasco over civil contingency planning for the floods in England (e.g. not telling the Chief Constable of Gloucester that if Purbright failed GCHQ had no back up power supply and half a million people would have no power or water)
(NB Douglas Alexander was Cabinet Office Minister for Civil Contingencies and the E-Government Minister before he got his current job at DfID preaching to the world); and New Deal (the Brown 'flagship') sank on Day One in Dundee in Jan 1998 with three Ministers in the Wellgate Job Centre (Brown, Dewar and Brian Wilson) when one of the first jobseekers asked to see the Executive and Professional Job Vacancies Register - only for a red-faced senior civil servant to jump in and explain to Donald Dewar that 'this was privatised in 1984 and ceased to exist in 1989'. The speech Brown then makes is changed at the last minute to add a line on future plans to extend the scheme to the older worker - redrafted on the basis of a Guardian story that day which pointed out the bleeding obvious that the 18-25 group on which they were focussing New Deal at launch was not the main problem for demographic reasons but it was cheaper and helped catch headlines.

But Gordon doesn't do detail alas?

Don't forget that there was scathing criticism of Douglas Alexander over the organisation of the Holyrood elections - where voters were treated as an afterthought and partisan decisions were taken;
and both Brown and Alexander
have to take some of the rap
for cutting budgets for flood defences in England when 'wee
Dougie' was combining the post of civil contingencies minister and minister of e-government at UK Cabinet Office a couple of years back. Government by a clique of Ministers who do not think through the detailed consequences of their inaction. They just hire the private sector & cut back on civil servants, then deny any responsibility always.

You might also get Michael Crick to look at the political geography of the data disaster and the Northern
Rock mess? Labour targetted voters
eligible for child benefit and they have now been badly let down. They have quickly been given guarantees
of reimbursement (by the banks) if
anyone hacks into their accounts -
but is that enough to satsify them?

25 million people affected of which 7 million+ have votes? Northern Rock
depositors are presumably skewed in the direction of North East English
constituencies - whereas the costs of the bail-out hit every taxpayer?
The geography of the flood victims
is obvious - but with foot and mouth (an outbreak from a Government body in the South of England) the real losers were farmers in Wales and Scotland hit by stock movement restrictions and who were refused assistance by Whitehall. Devolved administrations stepped into to fill the gap temporarily but farmers all over Scotland and Wales are furious with Whitehall which remains liable as a research station was the source.

Further to post #13 - Pirbright was of course the Government research station from which foot and mouth escaped; the switching station in Gloucestershire was at Walham and it provided the power for GCHQ as well.

The ID card system must be scrapped after this fiasco.

So far the government has said that this will be as secure as passports - is this the same passport that can be read wirelessly without even opening the envelope and the personal details decrypted because someone put the key inside as well. I look forward to having this level of incompetence handling my most personal details.

Also, they seem to always wield the biometric argument like some kind of security panacea; no matter how bad their system is, biometrics will secure it perfectly, although they don't quite know how yet.

Security guru Bruce Schneier reminds of the problems here when he writes:

"Once someone steals your biometric, it remains stolen for life; there's no getting back to a secure situation"

A fingerprint might be a way of identifying you, but it is not a key to be used for protecting data. It is not random, you leave copies of them on everything you touch, they can be stolen (or perhaps distributed by the government on a CD to save people the trouble) and they can't be updated or replaced when compromised. Another point that the government won't answer!

It seems that the only confidential data that the government can actually protect is the secret of their costing of the ID card project. After all, they have been ordered to release the information under the ineffective freedom of information act, yet so far have managed to prevent anyone from seeing it.

Unfortunately, the same protection doesn't appear to be available when it comes to protecting peoples most confidential information.