From BBC News:

UK's families put on fraud alert

Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing.

The Child Benefit data on them includes name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said there was no evidence the data had gone to criminals - but urged people to monitor bank accounts "for unusual activity".

The Conservatives described the incident as a "catastrophic" failure. [snip]

Now this is pretty serious stuff, and I'm one of the people affected. I certainly will be keeping a good eye on my bank account and my finances in general, and I'll be aware that my identity could be stolen at any time now, ever, even in the future when I'm dead - should this data fall into the wrong hands.

HOWEVER, I'm very suspicious at the way in which the media coverage seems to be designed to send us all into mass panic. On Breakfast we have presenter encouragin us to email in saying how worried we are. On Radio 1 we have a woman ranting irrationally that this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to her family (has she never heard of death?). Anyone would think the information was known to have been given to gangs of thugs intent on stealing children.

And meantime, sneakily overlooked, is the matter of why was this data being sent from one department to another in the first place? It was obviously required by a department that wouldn't normally need access to it. WHY?

Oooooh, how very eager I am to put my biometric data on file, so any government department can access it at will, handing it over to any criminal with a tame courier in the process!

Of course, honourable New Labour maintains that this was all down to one errant employee wilfully disregarding protocol. Nothing to do with governmental meddling even though this was surely the main cause of the error. HMRC has been in a complete mess ever since HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue combined in 2005. At the same time there were mass job losses, and we all know it's never the managers who go. In the course of the two years it has taken me to stop tax being taken from my dad's pension at source (he's not a tax payer), I have come across complete incompetence at all levels of HMRC - largely down to a system which breaks up jobs into their separate components. This means that no-one has responsibility for one task from start to finish - and thus no-one has to carry the can if the task is never completed. One of these 'components' is 'opening a letter'. I was honestly told once that 'it's registered on the computer that the letter has been received, but no one has dealt with it yet.' It was even implied that I was lucky the letter had been opened! Is it really surprising that an institution capable of such red-taped jobsworthiness can foul up so comprehensively?

Gordon Brown cannot pretend he doesn't know about this, because I wrote him a rather irate letter at the time putting him in the picture. So if anyone should carry the can, it is him (but of course, like the rest of New Labour, he doesn't respond to mail. And even Thatcher wasn't as discourteous as that).

I really hope this incident puts an end to the ID card proposals. It'll make a lifetime of looking over my shoulder (and my child's) worthwhile.