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More on the missing discs

Further to my piece The missing discs, dated November 26th, here is a bit from an Observer article dated December 2nd

…two discs were found at the home of a former contractor to the Department for Work and Pensions.
The worker discovered that she had inadvertently forgotten to return the discs when her work with the DWP finished - and expressed her surprise that no one had checked that she had done so.
The two new missing discs reveal what kind of benefits the people receive. The data on the discs can be accessed by any standard computer and is not encrypted or protected by a password.
The blunder comes days after the Government was forced to admit it had lost the personal details of more than 25 million people in the post.

You can read the full article here.

This is appalling. Firstly, why employ contractors? With an organisation like Work & Pensions, dealing with sensitive data, you need to have the data under control at all times. This means doing all computing in-house. I suppose they outsourced the stuff to save money but look where it's getting us! It's the same with the HMRC data that disappeared; it's all to do with making false economies. Like employing Blackwater in Iraq. Aaaargh! Will these bloody people never learn? Morons!
posted by josh at 3:01 pm