Personal information can be a toxic liability…

From Britain's Guardian, another fantastic tale of information leakage:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, yesterday denounced the consultancy firm involved in the development of the ID cards scheme for “completely unacceptable” practice after losing a memory stick containing the personal details of all of the 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales.

The memory stick contained unencrypted information from the electronic system for monitoring offenders through the criminal justice system, including information about 10,000 of the most persistent offenders…

Smith said PA Consulting had broken the terms of its contract in downloading the highly sensitive data. She said: “It runs against the rules set down both for the holding of government data and set down by the external contractor and certainly set down in the contract that we had with the external contractor.

An illuminating twist is that the information was provided to the contractor encrypted.  The contractor, one of the “experts” designing the British national identity card, unencrypted it, put it on a USB stick and “lost it”.   With experts like this, who needs non-experts? 

When government identity system design and operations are flawed, the politicians responsible suffer  the repercussions.  It therefore always fills me with wonder – it is one of those inexplicable aspects of human nature – that politicians don't protect themselves by demanding the safest possible systems, nixing any plan that isn't based on at least a modicum of the requisite pessimism.  Why do they choose such rotten technical advisors?

Opposition parties urged the government to reconsider its plan for the introduction of an ID card database following the incident. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “The public will be alarmed that the government is happy to entrust their £20bn ID card project to the firm involved in this fiasco.

“This will destroy any confidence the public still have in this white elephant and reinforce why it could endanger – rather than strengthen – our security.”

The Liberal Democrats were also not prepared to absolve the home secretary of responsibility. Their leader, Nick Clegg, accused Smith of being worse than the Keystone Cops at keeping data safe.

Clegg said: “Frankly the Keystone Cops would do a better job running the Home Office and keeping our data safe than this government, and if this government cannot keep the data of thousands of guilty people safe, why on earth should we give them the data of millions of innocent people in an ID card database?”

David Smith, deputy commissioner for the information commissioner's office, said: “The data loss by a Home Office contractor demonstrates that personal information can be a toxic liability if it is not handled properly , and reinforces the need for data protection to be taken seriously at all levels.”

Home Office resource accounts for last year show that in March of this year two CDs containing the personal information of seasonal agricultural workers went missing in transit to the UK Borders Agency. The names, dates of birth, and passport numbers of 3,000 individuals were lost.

If you are wondering why Britain seems to experience more “data loss” than anyone else, I suspect you are asking the wrong question.  If I were a betting man, I would wager that they just have better reporting – more people paying attention and blowing whistles.

But the big takeaway at the technical level is that sensitive information – and identity information in particular – needs to be protected throughout its lifetime.  If put on portable devices, the device should enforce rights management and only release specific information as needed – never allow wholesale copying.  Maybe we don't have dongles that can do this yet, but we certainly have phone-sized computers (dare I say phones?) with all the necessary computational capabilities.