Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Jon Snow and Peter Sommer on 25M Benefit details scandal

Jon Snow's interview with Peter Sommer at the end of (about 4 minutes in) this piece on the government's scandalous loss of copies of the personal details of 25 million people is absolutely compulsive viewing. (Click on the "Watch the report" link).

I've seen Peter Sommer give a variety of talks over the years on computer security and forensics and related issues and he has always been the calm rational voice of reason, even in the face of hostile questioning. I don't think I've ever seen him quite so animated as he is in this short interview with Jon Snow, getting right to the heart of the serious structural and cultural problems government has with computer systems.

Ross Anderson was also on the BBC last night being equally forceful and articulate on the government's shambolic approach to computer systems and transformational government whereby the government have been putting more and more personal data into larger and larger aggregated databases to which more and more people need routine access in order to do their jobs. Such a situation is absolutely impossible to secure.

Hopefully someone will stick these interviews on YouTube for posterity.

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