An urgent inquiry was underway in Britain yesterday after a disc containing the personal details of 5,000 justice staff went missing in yet another embarrassing data loss blunder.
Those affected are employees of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), who may include many prison officers.
“We believe nearly all of this data related to financial information — for example, invoices from prison service suppliers,” a Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said.
“However, we believe there is also a limited amount of personal information on around 5,000 NOMS employees including their names, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers and employee numbers,” she said.
A letter obtained by the News of the World newspaper said that private contractor EDS told the Prison Service in July that the hard drive had gone astray. The disc was last seen in July last year.
“I am extremely concerned about this missing data,” British Justice Secretary Jack Straw said in a statement, adding that he was only informed of it on Saturday.
He had “ordered an urgent inquiry into the circumstances and the implications of the data loss and the level of risk involved.”
“I have also asked for a report as to why I was not informed as soon as my department became aware of this issue. My officials are also in touch with EDS as part of these processes. We take these matters extremely seriously,” he said.
The news is the latest in a series of revelations in the past year of government data security blunders, with the Ministry of Defense last month admitting that more than 700 laptops had been lost or stolen since 2004.
Last November, the government admitted it had lost confidential records for 25 million Britons who receive child benefit payments, and in January, the defense ministry revealed that a laptop with details of some 600,000 people interested in joining the armed forces had been stolen from a naval officer.
The Home Office admitted on Thursday that personal details relating to every criminal in England and Wales had been lost.
PA Consulting informed the Home Office earlier last week that a computer memory stick that contained information about thousands of prolific criminals was lost by the contractor.
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
END OF AN ERA: The vote brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer, was elected president A center-right senator and a right-wing former president are to advance to a run-off for Bolivia’s presidency after the first round of elections on Sunday, marking the end of two decades of leftist rule, preliminary official results showed. Bolivian Senator Rodrigo Paz was the surprise front-runner, with 32.15 percent of the vote cast in an election dominated by a deep economic crisis, results published by the electoral commission showed. He was followed by former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in second with 26.87 percent, according to results based on 92 percent of votes cast. Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped
Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country. The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118km west of the capital. Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past, but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself. The government approved the move after a 52 percent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and
RSS