The managers should be sacked and the practice of enclosing the password with the disk investigated. This is clearly institutional disregard for data protection, not a one off incident as the government is trying to claim.

Alison, London,

This is unacceptable. Head must roll starting from Alistair Darling downwards. No one should be spared. It is a negligence of Himalayan proportion.

Dr. A. Kumar, Gt. Yarmouth, Norfolk, England

... and the government want us to give them a lot more data for their identity card scheme! They claim that this will reduce indentity theft but with their (mis-) management skills it will play into the fraudsters hands.

Ian Allerton, Watford, Herts

Read the article again James. It's the people who base their PINs on family birth (etc) dates that fear they may have cause for concern.

Brian, Southampton, UK

Agree with Falanx (Birmingham). Wait until the Security Services check ip on the way renewed Passports are delivered by Courier.

If no-one is at home the Passport is pushed through the letterbox and instead of a signature the Courier merely makes a note in his/her receipt book of the colour of the streetdoor and colour/type of fittings on it. Some security in this day and age ! And we are expected to believe that the 12,000 Passport that go missing each year are purely as a result of being "lost in transit">

John E.Flunder, London, England

This is not a problem when we do criticize one or two individuals. It`s a mayor problem when important personal information on data can´t be protected in U.K. and of course many other countries.

Karl G. Qvarfordt, Upplands Väsby, Sweden

UK once again - a total laughing stock

Further proof - (as if needed) - that New labour are utterly unfit for Government.

They make me so ashamed to be English.

Mike, London,

Like the England football team, the UK has a lot of good players and potential, but ends up being 2nd rate.

roger, london,

Many companies outsource their IT to save money. They then find to peform simple tasks, that they must pay large amounts of money and waste a lot of time for large outsourcing companies to do the work - often poorly. Worse, IT is only being taught at a basic level in UK schools, with lots of the work going to India. In 20 years time, one wonders who will be left to peform the most basic of IT tasks such as performing database queries that this case required.

roger, london,

Why are people changing their pin codes ? I thought these are not revealed to anyone... ? Does this mean the government doesn't need our signatures anymore and that someone can clean out all of our accounts simply by hitting "Enter" on a keyboard.. ?
I am surprised the news didn't result in a run on a number of banks with people withdrawing their money or at a minimum transfering their money to a new and 'secure' bank account.. just a thought.

James Bremen, Pinner, London

This is a direct result of the Government's insistance in handing every IT contract over to EDS, despite foul up after foul up (Pensions system, Child Tax Credit system etc) yet they charge the government millions in Taxpayers money for their incompetence. I worked for a company that used EDS in the past and they were a bunch of jokers back then, their 'system' got thrown out and replaced only a couple of years after going 'live'. Shame the Government are blind to their incompetence and keep handing them our money.

Claire James, Ruislip, Middlesex

Yes, ask HMRC about the State Second Pension Disk... that went missing too.

Chantel, UK,

There is only one word for this DISGUSTING! If I were to give erroneous advice in my profession I would pay the price by being sued by my clients, so I have professional indemnity insurance. So the government, hiding behind all the laws they have written, are refusing to fork out for any losses incurred as a result of the data being lost.... DISGUSTING! What hypocritical, spineless individuals... and they're running our country??!! Totally laughable!

Sickened, Belfast,

When it is said that the treasury were involved, we can safely assume that Gordon Brown is the name of the person most culpable, darling only carrying out his masters orders and most of the orders having been put in place months, if not years, ago. It is becoming ever more clear why Tony Blair didn't want to endorse Brown as PM.

David Leslie, Perth, Scotland

The positive in this deeply depressing saga is that the government is now under intense pressure to reform Data Protection Law and this desperately needs to be done. The question isn’t so much about what information the government has on various systems but who actually has access to this information. How can we be sure that they can be trusted? What safeguards will there be? How will this prevent our information from falling into the wrong hands or being abused? How secure is our information? Who watches the watchers?

All of this should have been resolved at least 20 years ago when Data Protection Laws were first being introduced. If it had then maybe the government wouldn’t find itself in the unfortunate position it is in now.

Jason Mead, Bristol, England

Does anyone else get the feelign these were intentionally lost?

Does anyone else get the feeling that someone, somewhere, very high up in the 'command' structure of this country, is facilitating oorganised crime?

Falanx

Falanx, Birmingham,

It beggars belief that this data should ever have got onto CDs in the first place - encrypted electronic transmission over a dedicated line would never have allowed this data get into the public domain.

Steve Jubb, Kegworth, UK

Well, now we at least know that a lot of people are incautious enough to use their children's names for their passwords, despite ten years' worth of advice to the contrary.

The statistic I'd REALLY like to know is how many of them already publish their children's names and birthdays on Facebook or Friends Reunited. 80%? 90%?

Ian Kemmish, Biggleswade, UK

This idea of "editing the database" is complete nonsense.

To pull out specific data from any of the big relational databases takes one line of code which takes 10 seconds to write. For instance:

Select NAME, BENEFIT, NI NUMBER from DATABASE NAME

And that is it. A couple more lines of code to print it out to a text document.

EDS are famous for charging millions for pennies worth of work. Why not investigate them instead?

Joss, Stony Stratford, UK

"Too burdensome" They are surely having a laugh.

select [field-1],[field-2]
from [tablename]
where [field-1 is not null

sounds like a fairly simple query to me.
does not seem as if this would cost such a vast amount of money.

Keith Wood, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

big disaster!

Zhang Haibo, Datong, China

England has fallen so far. It's sad.

Stosh2, Chicago,

There could be something positive out of this fiasco. If all applicants are required to reapply the fraudsters might be easier to spot.

That assumes of course that the Government cares.

BJ, London, England

A good day to hide bad news:

Whatever ones views about governmental incompetence in other fields, they have clearly not lost their ability to spin a dangerous story.

In their hurriedly convened huddle of the 15th-16th November, the most pressing topic was how to best spin the story.
Their resulting wheeze was to hold it back for six days or so, and even then to release the information via the well proven drip, drip method, by which time the football results would be in, and win or loose, the minds of Mr.average moron would then be filled by the media to distraction.
Thereafter the whole matter could be kicked into the long grass, or would anyway, likely be superseeded by the next monumental cock up or panic story to come along.

John Bayldon, Harrogate,