BBC: Now Hazel Blears loses personal computer, 'sensitive documents'

[emad]

Restricted files lost by minister
BBC

A personal computer holding sensitive documents relating to defence and extremism has been stolen from Hazel Blears' constituency office in Salford.

The theft may mean the communities secretary has broken rules on the handling of restricted government information, the BBC has learned.

The machine contained a combination of constituency and government information which should not have been held on it.

Manchester Police are investigating the theft, which took place on Saturday.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7459579.stm

[ikri]

1. So, when are the police

Going to investigate why Blears' had this information on her laptop?

And with all these documents and laptops going missing why are the government not using encryption? There are tools available (for free!) that will secure everything from a text file to an entire drive, not to mention the remote desktop options that are easily available that would allow ministers & civil servants to store sensitive information on a secure server that they could connect to from their own computers.

It's not rocket science.

[Nihil]

3. Not to mention ...

... a £22 piece of old technology that would have saved the day ...



True proof that the Peter Principle is alive and well in government.
:-(

[mrfrapp]

5. Government laptops

I know that laptop's used by the minions in the home office have full disk encryption and so are useless without the corresponding one-time-key generator and PIN. I'd be astonished if ministers aren't given similar set ups.

Of course it may have been Blears' *personal* laptop that was stolen, in which case the level of stupidity is in a brand new category.

[Briar]

2. "A PC was stolen. Nothing else was taken."

Was this a locked room with just one thing inside?

[moggie]

4. The BBC report says an alarm was triggered

The burglar may have been aware that the alarm had gone off, and just grabbed the nearest valuable and legged it.

Sir Humphrey says:

"Thankfully no damage has been done since the documents sent to her were not classified as secret or top secret. And in any event the computer was password protected"

"Password protected" could mean anything from "the entire disk was encrypted using a government-approved algorithm with a decent key length" to "she had an easily bypassed login password". I wish the media were more IT-literate, so that they could challenge such complacency.