The Child Benefit Agency – the UK organization for paying child benefit has managed to loss a couple of CDs containing enough information for various forms of credit and identity fraud to be committed.  The BBC NEWS cover the story in more depth.

This in my mind is an illustration of why national Id cards are so dangerously wrong.  One of the goals of the Id card is to make it easier to manage people’s Ids.  So if the Id data went missing and people rely and trust an Id card as they meant to be ‘safe and secure’ there is huge exposure to fraud and worse.

I’m sure that this story will run for sometime and we will see people blaming the IT, although tragically the problem is actually people, and organizational culture.