International Law

Home Office and PA Consulting lose the names and addresses of all the most serious criminals in the UK

It appears that the Home Office and their sub-contractor PA Consulting have put people's lives in danger, by losing an unencrypted memory stick, containing the personal name and address details of every prisoner in in the UK, about 84,000 people, and also the 43,000 most dangerous criminals.

How many murders, kidnappings , rapes, blackmail attempts etc. will this lead to, if this data gets into the hands of serious criminals or vigilantes ?

Why should anyone believe that the National Identity Register will not be compromised in a similar way, by exactly the same people i.e. the Home Office and their "delivery partner" PA Consulting ?

Remember that when, not if, something similar happens to your biometric fingerprint details on the National Identity Register, they will have been compromised for the rest of your life.

Why were PA Consulting mucking around with a copy, or multiple copies of live data containing tens of thousands of real records ? That is not required to develop a new "tracking system", until the very final testing stages of the project, at which point the full security and scalability of the system should already have been proven.

See the Home Office's Crime Reduction website description of JTrack, which seems to operate over the Police National Network.

Will anybody actually resign over this disaster ? It will cost a lot of money, to change the identities of Protected Witnesses and Confidential Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS), and innocent members of their families, many of whom will be on these lists, and some of whom are being actively hunted by other criminals.

See the whistleblower story in the Daily Mail:

New data fiasco as Home Office 'loses' secret records of worst offenders

By James Slack

Last updated at 11:28 PM on 21st August 2008

Secret personal details of Britain's most dangerous criminals have been lost by the Government.

The public could now face an enormous bill to protect paedophiles, rapists, drug runners and killers from vigilantes or rival gangsters.

The names, addresses, details of convictions and even jail release dates of almost 130,000 people were all in Home Office files lost when a computer memory stick went missing.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on August 21, 2008 (boomark / email).