Thursday 22 May 2008

Latest from NO2ID

Banks in Belgium are telling customers that their accounts will be blocked if they do not show their ID cards. Legislation in Belgium requires that all banks must take copies of each customer’s ID.
ID cards have been in use in Belgium since last year and are issued to citizens at birth. They carry an embedded digital signature that allows holders to participate in online banking, filing tax returns and carrying out e-government transactions. Unlike the proposed UK ID Cards, they allow users to check all of the information held about them on the national register, although they cannot change their data.

More data leaks. This time in Chile. Personal data on 6 million Chileans was stolen at the beginning of this month and was briefly published on a website. The hacker admits to stealing the data online from the health ministry, electoral authority and state-run telephone company.
In Germany the government has admitted to the disappearance of 189 desktop computers, 328 laptops, 38 data storage devices and 271 mobile phones in their employ between 2005 and 2007. Sensitive data was contained on a number of these devices.

"The new questionnaire, known as the Common Assessment Framework (CAF), is part of a £20million programme called Every Child Matters (ECM), ostensibly set up to ensure youngsters are safe and leading positive lives.
Professionals - such as police officers, teachers and doctors - and volunteers are now under orders to subject children to a questionnaire if they consider them "at risk": a definition so broad that many decent parents could find themselves labelled as potential abusers.
The questions don't need a parent's consent since any child over 12 is deemed responsible enough to grant permission for an interview.
Any child not achieving the Government's five "outcomes" - being healthy, staying safe, enjoying life, "making a positive contribution", and achieving " economic well-being" - is now defined as having "additional needs". The Daily Mail 17/5/08

£10.5 million has just been wasted on another piece of abortive BB technology. The Identity and Passport Service has canceled its highly complicated online passport applications system because of rising costs and technical difficulties, which entailed about 5,000 applications becoming stuck in the system.

The government has finally admitted that it cannot definitively say that the £5.4 billion spent on the National Identity Scheme (NIS) will bring the expected benefits to justify the expense. James Hall, chief executive of the Identity & Passport Service, said, "Many of these benefits (of the NIS) may be hard to quantify and potentially harder to articulate in financial terms within the scheme's business case."

Despite government promises to the contrary, it seems that anyone could gain access to patients’ confidential data on the NHS computer database since a GP has found that he could log onto it without any security checks!

Cyber-Ark's Inter-Business Vault has just been installed by Sunderland City Council. This system will allow data sharing among many NGAs as well as the police and council in a bid to stop anti-social behaviour. Of course it will do nothing of the sort, just enable BB to snoop 24/7!