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Can the data leak fiasco be fixed?

It's tempting to wonder what, if anything is or will have been learned from the UK government's data leakage fiasco.

Details are starting to emerge about how it all came about. Some ten days ago, a government-held database containing the names, addresses, NI numbers and bank account details of 25 million Brits -- including children, who have a long wait to see if their identities have been compromised -- was burned, unencrypted, onto two CDs and shipped off in the post. The CDs didn't arrive, and the data has yet to be recovered.

As we remarked last week, availability of the right technology to prevent such idiocy is not the problem. Rather, it's a lack of security awareness and education among those in charge of the data.

But we'd argue that it goes deeper than that.

Britain has long been afflicted by a class divide that many argue has been eradicated, following three decades of unalloyed capitalistic government. That divide is still present -- and evidence is all around, principally propagated by many in the mass media who take much delight in announcing to the world how useless they are when it comes to handling technology.

Where does this attitude come from? The major educational establishments -- you know who you are -- are renowned for producing arts graduates who end up floating to the top of Britain's various hierarchies: government, civil service, and the media being just three examples.

And surveys continue to show that, compared to the UK's major rivals such as the USA and the rest of the EU, the arts are more considered more valuable than the physical sciences.

So what happens when these people are put in charge of IT, whose capabilities they don't understand -- and which they are proud not to understand? They blithely do to a database what they would do to a ripped CD at home: burn it and stick it in the post.

Against this level of ingrained, self-imposed ignorance, it's hard to imagine that the government's inquiry into how the fiasco came about will do much more than whitewash the senior individuals who failed to grasp the enormity of the responsibility they wielded.

Is it even feasible that they'll be re-educated? I think not.