This amused me, remember to engage Brain

We will all have our favourite television presenters and those that we loath, people whose shear presence has us reaching for the off button. Well Jeremy Clarkson is one of the ones I loathe. I know that I am in a minority as recently in one of the tabloid papers they were saying that he should be Prime Minster.

It is not that he presents a motoring programme, although that is partly why I find him distasteful. But it’s the fact that via his programme and in his various newspaper columns, he tacitly urges people to break the law. Speeding is a crime and is the number one factor behind most of the deaths and injuries on the roads.

Add to that his blokes attitude and opinions and for me he comes across as an arrogant unreconstructed male chauvinist, and that explains why I dislike him. Mind you he thinks worst of me.

Well, following the loss of discs containing the bank details, along with lots of other details of use to fraudsters and paedophiles) of half the population of the UK, he dismissed the fears and furore as hype, and printed his full bank account details in one of the papers he writes for. The result is he has lost money from his account. Not stolen but to a charity as a direct debit taken out in his name.

Sometimes you really should engage your brain before releasing the clutch to your mouth.

Link to the Article

Don’t blame the Clerk

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that the Inland Revenue has lost in the post the data on all the 25 million people that receive child benefit. The part of the story that I was most alarmed about as it was reported yesterday was that a junior clerk had sent this information. What is alarming is that, if true as reported and I heard what Alistair Darling said, verbatim, that anyone in a junior position would be able to access all the records and to be able to copy them.

I refrained from calling this clerk all the stupid names he deserved to be called if it had been his fault, simply because knowing how people always try and avoid the blame when something goes wrong, was it really just a clerk that had done this.

Well today new information emerges. While the facts as reported were true, it was the facts that emerged late tonight that shows he was only carrying out instructions from above. It turns out that the National Audit Office requested that the data was stripped of anything that sensitive, this was refused by the revenue, on the grounds of cost. Also these emails asking for the information were copied to a person at director level, that fourth down the chain of command from the top, so the poor clerk who was being blamed for this was and is innocent.

It is interesting to note that the clerk, a young man of twenty-three, has been whisked away to a hotel to keep him away from the media. Oh how damaging his account will be.

In the UK we have to provide to various government bodies and departments all sorts of private and confidential information, we don’t have a choice. Therefore the government has to ensure that this data is secure. While I don’t agree with the paranoid people that say that no governments can be trusted, I don’t feel happy supplying any further information to any government department with this extremely poor level of data protection in place at the moment.