Of those 600,000 potential recruits, more extensive personal data, including passport details, national insurance numbers, driving licence details, family details, doctors’ addresses and National Health Service numbers were lost for about 153,000 people.”For around 3,700 people, banking details were also included,” Browne said.The information was not encrypted.Browne said the police and intelligence services had been informed but the severity of the risk would depend “on whether this information fell into the hands of extremists”. There were no indications that this had happened.Following an internal investigation by the MoD, Browne told MPs, it had emerged that, in addition to the laptop stolen earlier this month, two further laptops, “potentially containing similar data, had been stolen”.The first was a Royal Navy laptop, stolen from a car in Manchester in October 2006. The second was an army recruiting laptop, containing details of around 500 individuals, stolen from a careers office in Edinburgh in December 2005.These incidents were reported at the time to the local police and to the “chain of command” but neither was reported to ministers.The defence secretary announced an inquiry by the chairman of the Information Advisory Council, Sir Edmund Burton, into weaknesses in MoD information security procedures.The shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, said the most recent incident showed “incompetence, mismanagement and poor procedures” on the part of the authorities and was potentially more damaging than HM Revenue and Customs’ loss of 25 million people’s child benefit details.%26#183; This article was amended on Tuesday January 22 2008. We meant to say ‘breaches’ not ‘breeches’. This has been corrected.
Tags: authorities, family, national insurance number, rth
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