Ramblings

As my postings here have been dealing with some serious issues, I thought I would be a bit more light hearted today and share a picture that I took early in the morning the other week. While I know that not everyone who reads this Blog agrees with me about how serious climate change is, one of my regular “tormentors” who must be local and knows me, did try to moderate his language in one comment sent to me. But even as I tried to edit out the F and C words I realised that it was just incomprehensible. I know that the person must be local as he, and I am presuming it’s a he, called me a “Long Haired Freak”. If he weren’t local how would he know that I was a freak?

On the news today I heard that another set of data has been “Mislaid” by another government department. I was trying to chop some vegetables when this came on the radio and the spokesman from the government that had come along to defend, I am not sure if that’s the right word, the government gloried in the title of Minister for Data Sharing and Protection. I had to stop preparing the vegetables as I was laughing so much, he had obviously got the sharing part off to an art form, it’s just the protection that needs a bit more work.

I had no sooner gone back to cooking when I heard that an Italian has been appointed as Manager for the English Football team and his first job will not be to sort out the players, or anything like that, but to learn English! Something he plans to do in a month! Now I know bugger all about football or any sport for that matter, but I would have thought that having a manager who can communicate in the player’s language was a pre requisite.

I had wanted to post some more information regarding my wildlife watching but I have been too busy to get my notes in order. Also I now have about ten books that I need to read. I think that I may just go into hibernation for a short while. As the weather has been frosty all day for most of the last week, hibernation looks like a great idea.

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.