Vanishing laptops
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To lose one laptop computer might be considered unfortunate. To lose two laptop computers is pretty careless. For civil servants to lose 90 laptop computers over a five-year period is just damned stupid, if not criminally irresponsible.
On the other hand, if the Irish Independent's ongoing revelations about the abuse of information entrusted to public service officials makes people more aware of the dangers, then something may have been achieved.
The British public had such a wake-up call when a junior official at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs popped in the post, unregistered, two unencrypted CDs containing key personal and financial details of 25 million people, or 40pc of the population.
The ensuing scandal of the lost data got people talking and thinking about personal privacy and data security. In this country we have been made aware some civil servants cannot be trusted with people's personal and private information.
Analysing the scandal of the lost laptops and government department security breaches in general, an expert on data protection today cites the lamentable fact that the more public servants who can access data, the more likely it is that "something will go wrong".
The Data Commissioner is already investigating abuses by civil servants suspected of illegally leaking sensitive information about individuals.
His inquiry is a response to a previous Irish Independent investigation which revealed that staff in the Department of Family and Social Affairs had accessed information on its computer files and passed it on to third parties.
Revenue employees were also found to have accessed sensitive information out of "idle curiosity".
We are told that the laptops which have disappeared from various government departments contain no sensitive information.
This seems barely credible.
Even if we accept that information is not retained after data is accessed, public servants are privy to personal information.
That information is the material with which the civil servant works . . . presumably on his or her laptop.
Government departments are apparently under cyber siege from hackers and thieves.
This is bad enough without careless and irresponsible officials adding to the problems.
