Graham Coles

UK

Engineering Software Engineers

Could we please have a mandatory fine or jail sentence for anyone using the phrase:

' ... take the security of customer information very seriously ...'

when describing how they've just compromised a large amount of unencrypted personal data.

I'm sorry, but this PR crap is really just getting a bit much. If HMRC had have actually taken security of their information seriously it would have been encrypted. No excuses, no spin, it would have been done!

How much effort could it possibly take to use a truecrypt volume or gpg to encrypt the file. Clearly far to much for a government organization that 'takes security really seriously'.

At last they are finally being exposed. The next time that I hear some halfwitted government minister saying how seriously they will protect data used in their shambles of an ID card project, I'll know exactly what they mean. Something between the amount of care they take by not encypting personal pension data at all and encrypting details on a wireless passport that also contains the key in plaintext.

If only consumer law applied to governments, we could send this one back for a refund ... it clearly doesn't work properly.