You know it’s funny…every time I think that Sir Humprey’s snivil servants and the Whitehall worms can’t possibly screw up anything else, I read another story which illustrates even more monumental failings.

The recent reluctant admission by the Ministry of Defense, that more than 100 USB memory sticks, some containing secret information, have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defense since 2004, is a new low in data protection balls-ups.

And if the memory sticks weren’t bad enough, the MOD also admits that nearly 650 laptops have also been stolen from their offices in the same time period.

Of course the MOD didn’t make this announcement voluntarily. If it hadn’t been for Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather tabling a question in parliament, we probably still wouldn’t know about it.

Furthermore, the laptop figure at least only includes laptops identified as stolen…but not the number that have been lost (that probably needs another question).

And despite all the evidence to the contrary, the MOD continues to insist that it’s security policies were “generally fit for purpose”.

This comes only a couple of days after the Sunday Times and the Beeb both reported that there are now more than 1,000 laws and regulations which permit officials to force entry into homes, cars and business premises.

Does anyone out there still believe that:-

a) The government can be trusted with our personal details for use with ID cards?

b) Much of the more recent legislation, ostensibly created to “prevent terrorism” was indeed intended to do just that and is not intended to give the snivels ever more power over us peons?

If you answered “Yes” to either question, please send me your e-mail address, so I can reply with the name of a good shrink (or I can try and get you in on the ground floor of this great pyramid scheme I’ve heard about).

This probably goes some way to explaining why a growing number of us feel more and more like extras in some sort of bizarre Chaplin-esque comedy…that happens to be in colour and have sound.

If we are really serious about defeating terrorism and simultaneously protecting human rights, the best thing we could do would be to box up all these arseholes and ship them to Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Within a month, they will have lost Mugabe’s vote count tally’s, Kim Il-sung’s porn collection and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear blueprints. At the same time they will have introduced a whole raft of new laws which deny any form of privacy to the masses, who – since they aren’t British – will rise up and kill them all.

…and the rest of us will live happily; if not ever-after, then at least for awhile.

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