MoD loses 11,000 ID cards
PrintIs that good?
Posted in Government, 12th March 2008 11:41 GMT
Free whitepaper – Blade learning lab and technical community
The Ministry of Defence has lost 11,000 military ID cards in the last two years, the government has admitted to parliament.
Although this seems like a paltry loss compared to the 25m records lost by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, it is still rather a lot, particularly when you consider the armed forces amount to less than 200,000 souls in all. The admission came in a written answer to MPs.
The Tories said the losses were more evidence that the government's plans for a national ID card were fatally flawed and would not improve security.
A LibDem defence spokesman echoed the sentiment, suggesting the loss showed the inherent weakness of the proposals on ID cards, and that the scheme would do nothing to counter the threat of terrorism.
An MoD spokesman told The Register that the figures included lost cards and those that had worn out.
The spokesman said the MoD had no plans to change the cards but that it was looking at data protection more generally in line with the government's review of its own policies. The cards include photographs, name and rank. ®
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Managing desktop software for fun and profit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Enabling the Agile Data Center
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter