HMRC loses 15,000 personal data records by courier

According to the Government, ID cards, and the Identity database is, as with all technology of this sort, full of "safeguards". They take our data very seriously you see. So seriously in fact that Her Majestys Revenue and Custom apparently put in on cds, give it to couriers and then wait a month before informing 15,000 tpeople hat their personal data has been lost.

Apparently the data is "encoded" and measures have been put in place to monitor the people whose data was on the disk. This suggests, at least to me, that the encoding was not particularly strong. It might be worth someone asking a question about what their encryption policy actually is.