webofevil: (Default)
British spy loses secrets in a handbag

A British agent has thrown the war against drug traffickers into chaos by leaving top secret information about covert operations on a bus in South America.

In a blunder that has cost taxpayers millions of pounds and put scores of lives at risk, the drugs liaison officer lost a computer memory stick said to contain a list of undercover agents’ names and details of more than five years of intelligence work.

It happened when the MI6-trained agent left her handbag on a transit coach at El Dorado airport in Bogota, Colombia. Intelligence chiefs were forced to wind up operations and relocate dozens of agents and informants amid fears the device could fall into the hands of drugs barons. [Times]
webofevil: (dagnabbit)
A personal computer holding sensitive documents relating to defence and extremism has been stolen from Hazel Blears’s constituency office in Salford.

The theft may mean the communities secretary has broken rules on the handling of restricted government information, the BBC has learned.

Just last week a cabinet official was suspended for leaving top secret documents on a train. Another file of documents, including one restricted one, was found on another train, also last week.

But previous security lapses have all been made by unidentified civil servants. A security breach in a cabinet minister's office is doubly embarrassing for the government. [BBC]
No-one who is a a member of this government or who has been appointed to a civil service role in the past 10 years is allowed to handle a classified document ever again. From now on the collation and transmission of such material is to be left to dedicated teams of cubs and brownies.
webofevil: (Default)
Well, if the last couple of months have shown us anything, it’s that the values and work ethic of the private sector make it far more suitable than the public sector for handling sensitive data.
Stolen: Top secret entry codes to 73 police stations

Top-secret entry codes to some of Britain's biggest police stations have been stolen in an astonishing Scotland Yard security blunder.

The details—which gave confidential keypad access numbers to 73 police stations across London—were stolen from a car owned by a worker for a vehicle-maintenance contractor. The disclosure raises disturbing questions about how highly sensitive information is being treated by private firms working for public bodies.

For nearly 12 hours, officers all over the capital were on high alert after the driver told police he had left a clipboard on his back seat containing the secret entry-code numbers. [Mail]
... Oh.

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