UK ID Card Scheme Data Deleted For £400K 149
DaveNJ1987 writes "It will cost the British government only £400,000 to destroy the data for its failed ID card initiative. The data compiled by the National Identity Register, which was scrapped last year by the coalition government, will be disposed of for the relatively small sum — in government figures — Home Office minister Damian Green confirmed."
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally as a UK citizen I'd much rather they paid someone who knew what they were doing to do it properly than just "wiped the disks".
For a start, you do realise that for data like this destruction of the physical storage medium is a requirement, right? (It's right there in the article)
Obviously, reliable destruction of data costs 400,000 GBP, right?. Please, don't be silly. It's really amusing how people are trying to justify silly things politicians are obviously doing to setup cash for their cronies.
Do you know how seized drugs are often destroyed?
Blast furnace.
Please tell me which data storage medium will survive blast furnace?
And then tell me what can possibly cost 400,000 GBP.
For 400,000 GBP I can build a whole damn system which will reliably destroy data.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
You clearly do not grasp the sheer idiocy, incompetence and utter lack of any skills whatsoever which characterises the British civil service. These days there IS no IT department apart from the outsourced PFI numpties who charge for each and every action performed. This is why whole database dumps get transferred all over the place; there isn't anyone who has the handy database skills to run a quick SQL query and put out only the required data into a twin-key encrypted package, because the way the PFI deal was written every such action costs the Government money.
Add to this the last Government had a number of highly embarrassing incidents of data loss, where USB sticks were let on trains, and in one case CD-ROMs of sensitive data were encrypted, but the password for the encryption was written onto the media disks themselves. The civil servants were complying with the regulations, but doing so in such a way that no hassle over passwords would occur. The same civil servants that did this are still employed, and the UK Home Office (which is dealing with this data) has the reputation of being the dumping ground for all the most incompetent, most useless and most stupid civil servants in Government.
Outsourcing data disposal like this is the safest way to ensure complete destruction without any little unofficial backups being taken and sold on, or people "forgetting" to wipe the disks before ebaying them, and so on. 400K is peanuts compared to the cost of cleanup after a data leak.