Black Tuesday

Just as some remote tribesmen fear that cameras and mirrors have the power to steal their souls, so the people of the modern world have come to fear that computers have the power to misuse and misdirect their most private data. Identity theft is a potent nightmare of the digital age, and it is with deep foreboding that we part with personal information even to departments of government that should, in a well-ordered democratic society, be the most secure of all repositories of it.

For HM Revenue & Customs to allow the National Insurance number and bank account details of a single citizen to fall into unknown hands would be a serious failure. For this monstrous ministry to mislay the details of 25 million citizens, many of them children, by the casual act of downloading the data on to disks and dispatching those disks to another arm of the bureaucracy by unregistered post, is a scandal of such proportions that its magnitude was only beginning to sink in as we went to press.