HMRC swipes villain award from ISPs

By Dave Nixon

The internet has a new rogue. In conjunction with infamous botnets, crime hubs and black-hat hackers a name to strike dread into the hearts of anyone who holds security dear can be added – the UK’s HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

This is the confrontational view of the Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA), which used a gala dinner on 14 March to hand the government service the ‘Internet Villain’ of the year award for 2007, “for failing to take the protection of peoples’ personal data seriously and highlighting bad practice in protecting data by loosing computer disks containing confidential details of 25 million child benefit recipients” - a decision that stretches the definition of Internet to its maximum.

ISPA is referring, obviously, to the HMRC’s darkest hour of recent times, November’s misplacing of several CD discs holding UK child benefit records, together with the names and addresses of every single child in the country.

Catastrophe it unquestionably was, but the HMRC will be saddened to have won the unwanted honor against such tough opposition, including BT (”for changing the whole engineering plan for 21CN only six months before the launch date”) and French President, Nicolas Sarkozy (”for his proposed new tax on internet access and mobile phone use to fund France’s two public television channels, which would be free of advertising”).

Defeating them merits the rank as a dark achievement of phenomenal proportions.