Daily Archives: August 4, 2009


Mark Ballard writes in Computer Weekly: Nine staff have been sacked from their local authority jobs for snooping on personal records of celebrities and personal acquaintances held on the core database of the government’s National Identity Scheme. They are among 34 council workers who illegally accessed the Customer Information System (CIS) database, which holds the biographical data of the population that will underpin the government’s multi-billion-pound ID card programme. The disclosures, obtained by Computer Weekly using the Freedom of Information Act, will add to calls for the government to come clean over the security of the National Identity Scheme. The CIS database, run by the Department for Work and Pensions, stores up to 9,800 items of information on 92 million people, including sensitive data, such as ethnicity, relationship history, whether someone is being investigated for fraud and whether they have special needs.

Nine sacked over National Identity Scheme breaches