Systems failure
Another week, another government computer system goes tits up.
Last week Channel Four reported that the £4 billion MOD computer system was “not fit for purpose” (John Reid’s phrase is seemingly here to stay). The Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) was meant to be online by the end of March this year. It is supposed to allow the army to order supplies more efficiently, for instance. Despite costing billions of pounds, DII is eighteen months behind schedule.
The MOD chose a consortium called Atlas to implement DII. At the head of Atlas is EDS, a company that has already screwed up the tax credits system which shelled out over £5 billion in overpayments. It doesn’t take great insight, surely, to realise that DII was always going to go wrong. It’s like putting Harold Shipman in charge of an old people’s home.
Back in March, you may remember, thousands of junior doctors’ details somehow made it onto the internet. These details included their criminal records, sexual orientation and religious beliefs. Then Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said that MTAS, the online application system used by those applying for their first hospital position, “had not been an unmitigated disaster”. So that’s alright then. As long as it’s only a slight disaster, that’s good enough for Pat.
Incredibly, an even bigger loss of personal data happened this week at HM Revenue and Customs. Computer discs containing the personal details of everyone who receives child benefit have been lost. That’s over seven million families and 25 million names.
25 million?! That’s a stupid number. It’s more than three times the population of Switzerland. How can you possibly lose that many names?
It seems that the discs were put in the post, not by recorded delivery as is usual procedure, and never appeared at their final destination (the National Audit Office, for those who are interested).
This is an incredible piece of incompetence. There is probably more care taken over delivering a book by Amazon, than there is over the names, addresses, bank account details and National Insurance numbers of 25 million people.
The discs are password protected, and according to Chancellor Alistair Darling, the discs haven’t “fallen into the wrong hands”. But this was still a breach of data protection (this sort of personal info shouldn’t just be bunged in the internal post) and the head of HM Revenue and Customs, Paul Gray, has resigned over the issue.
It’s nice to see the head of an organisation taking responsibility and resigning for once. Unlike, say, Sir Ian Blair. When a string of operational procedures goes wrong and an innocent man is shot, Sir Ian does not see this as a resigning issue. What is the point of paying the head of something lots of money if they can’t be arsed to take responsibility when things go wrong?
The scariest thing about all these computer systems failures is that the government wants to set up an even bigger computer system. The national database for ID cards would be humungously (yes, I’m sure that’s a word) large, with personal details and even biometrics on them. It’s not just names and addresses, but people’s eye scans and fingerprint details too.
There are those who argue in favour of ID cards from the point of view of: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” This is a ridiculous position anyway, but let us give it the respect it doesn’t deserve. If your personal details and bits of your eye are on a database, and there is a very big chance that this information could be lost, or accidentally leaked onto the internet for everyone in the world to see, than I think we do have a reason to fear. Don’t you?
Cory
