Britain Suffers another Privacy Breach

News.com.au has the details on the latest loss of personal data, under the responsibility of the British government:

...Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly told Parliament a private contractor reported in May that a hard disc drive had gone missing from a facility in Iowa in the US.

It contained the names, addresses and other details of more than three million candidates for a theory test taken by learner drivers in Britain. The disc drive did not contain any bank account or credit card details, Ms Kelly said.

"I apologise for any uncertainty or concern that these individuals may experience," she said. She also revealed that two discs containing the details of 7500 vehicles and the names and addresses of their owners had been lost in transit....

Britain's Privacy Breach

On November 22, 2007, Gordon Rayner and Andrew Porter reported in the Telegraph:

Two compact discs containing bank details and addresses of 9.5 million parents
and the names, dates of birth and National Insurance numbers of all 15.5 million
children in the country went missing after a junior employee of HM Revenue and
Customs put them in the post, unrecorded and unregistered.

Today, the Telegraph reports that even more British citizen's privacy and identities have been compromised:

... since the loss of the HMRC discs came to light, "quite a number of
organisations, both public and private sector, have come to us saying that they
think they have found a problem... almost on a confessional basis, bringing to
our attention problems they have encountered with security in their own
organisations".

And Andrew Porter reports in the Telegraph today that witness protection program participants have also had their real identities compromised:

The missing data discs are understood to contain both the real names and the new
identities of up to 350 people who have had their identities changed after
giving evidence against major criminals.

Passport Privacy Breach

Canadian citizens have been exposed to privacy breaches and possible identity theft through their passport website - Passport Canada, according to a report on the Toronto Globe & Mail:

... The breach was discovered last week by an Ontario man completing his own passport application. He found he could easily view the applications of others by altering one character in the Internet address displayed by his Web browser.
"I was expecting the site to tell me that I couldn't do that," said Jamie Laning of Huntsville. "I'm just curious about these things so I tried it, and boom, there was somebody else's name and somebody else's data."

That data included social insurance numbers, driver's licence numbers and addresses.

Also available were home and business phone numbers, a federal ID card number and even a firearms licence number....

Islam - Nanny-State, Do-Gooder/Busy-Body Heaven?

Miret el Naggar reveals, in the McClatchy Newspapers today, the extent of the busy-body/do-gooder/nanny-state that Islam enables:

"Unlike the state-sanctioned morality police of conservative theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, Egypt's enforcers are ordinary people who take it upon themselves to offer religious "advice," often to strangers.

Unveiled women are the primary targets, but the enforcers also chastise Muslim men for dating, not observing prayer times or allowing their wives or sisters to wear revealing clothes.
Television preachers, Saudi religious literature and religious instruction in mosques all are encouraging practicing Muslims to offer such advice to others, even if unsolicited.

...To add insult to injury, sheiks who've devoted their lives to studying Islam's intricacies are finding themselves upstaged by religious vigilantes with no formal training."