Present Tense:'Idiots," wrote a columnist in the London Times this week. "Utter, unbelievable, jaw-dropping, unpardonable idiots." Shane Hegartyreports.
She was referring to the news that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs had lost the personal data of 25 million people (including the British prime minister) because they had put all the details on two CDs and popped them in the internal post, at which point they disappeared to who knows where.
Learning careful lessons from this, another couple of discs were sent by registered post. They made it through.
It was, of course, the big news of the week in the UK. Misplacing the addresses, dates of birth, national insurance, bank and building society details of half the country's population is bound to be.
And while, from this side of the Irish Sea, it would be tempting to shout over at them to look down the back of the couch, or ask where did they last remember having them, the fact is that we are having our own problems - they just happen to be on a smaller scale.
But some day we too may get a whopper. Because what is clear is that, while we can create sophisticated software that can protect any digitised data, there will never be any software available that will wipe idiocy from the human race.
The case of the missing CDs (perhaps they went back into the wrong album cover) was not the only breach this week, only the largest. Across the planet, newspapers had already reported personal data being leaked, pinched, lost or left in taxis.
Taken as a snapshot, they indicated that such data is as secure as water in a colander.
At which point, computer security experts may suggest that this exaggerates the problem, but it really has been an extraordinary week in which we've learned of lost discs, bank details sent to the wrong addresses, and Government departments sending individuals' private data to insurance companies.
What makes it worse is that it was the kind of week in which you become less worried about the things you've heard about and more about the things you haven't.
First, here are the known misadventures of man and machine. In the US, a Carolina medical company admitted it has no leads in its search for a laptop that went missing after an ambulance driver drove off while it was resting on the back bumper. It contained the personal records of 28,000 people.
In Indiana, three stolen computers contained the personal records of 12,000 military veterans. This follows a string of such incidents, including one in which information on 26.5 million veterans was stolen from an official who brought his laptop home from work.
In Britain, the Land Registry website stopped allowing anonymous users check personal details after an identity theft led to a homeowner's details being used to take out a £140,000 (€195,000) mortgage by a fraudster who has since disappeared.
Meanwhile, the UK's data protection watchdog called for criminal penalties against those who lose laptops which contain sensitive information. In March, it had only been able to give a slap on the wrist to 11 banks that had dumped clients' details in outdoor rubbish bins.
And here, the Data Protection Commissioner said there is an audit taking place at the Department of Social and Family Affairs after it was realised that private details had been passed on to insurance companies. Meanwhile, AIB announced that 15,000 advice slips were sent to the wrong customers, although it blames a computer error for this.
And, of course, we had the amusing story about the two bags of mail sent to the Four Courts shredder by mistake. It's somewhat different, of course, because it was on paper rather than disc, and it involved destroying (rather than sharing) data. But this information massacre was another reminder of how often things seem to go wrong.
Such problems appear to be the price of a paperless bureaucracy, of online banking and a cashless economy. Of having the important details of your life contained on a few digits of code that can be held alongside millions of others on something small enough to carry in your pocket.
In the old days, if you wanted to get your hands on the records of 25 million people, you would have had to figure out a way of squeezing a couple of warehouses into a van. Now, it seems, you just have to follow some junior official home from his Christmas party and wait for him to leave his laptop in the taxi.
So, we hand over our personal information and wonder, not who will catch it, but who will drop it. And while an entire industry has developed solely to plug the gaps in firewalls, to tackle malware, and to combat hackers, there is still nothing better at circumventing our most sophisticated technology than good old-fashioned human stupidity.
