A disk that reportedly carries personal details on some 100,000 serving British military personnel is missing, the Ministry of Defense said on Friday.
The military confirmed a report in the Sun newspaper that contractor EDS lost track of a portable hard drive, but said it could not comment on the claim that it contains names, addresses, passport numbers and driver’s license information of service personnel along with data on 600,000 potential recruits.
“We don’t know what’s on it, and we don’t even know if there’s anything on it,” a defense spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with military policy.
A government-mandated data security review was unable to account for the disk, said EDS UK, the British subsidiary of Plano, Texas-based EDS.
It said the disk was being stored at its secure facility in Hook, a town about 70km west of London when it disappeared.
EDS refused to say whether the disk was encrypted.
The military said it was investigating the incident, which it said became known earlier this week.
The loss is one in a series of information breaches at the ministry. Last month it said a disk carrying sensitive personnel information was stolen from a military base. Earlier this year, the military said a laptop with details of 600,000 new and prospective recruits was stolen.
The British government has struggled to get a handle on data losses even as it rolls out an ambitious national identification card program. Last year’s loss of computer disks containing information — including banking records — on nearly half the UK population caught international attention. A steady stream of data blunders since then has kept the spotlight on the way the government handles — or mishandles — its citizens’ information.
Civil libertarians and opposition politicians have seized on the losses to argue against further government data-gathering.
Conservative Member of Parliament Nigel Evans said the news “will be music to the ears of fraudsters everywhere,” noting the irony of the loss being announced during the National Identity Fraud Prevention Week, an awareness drive partly sponsored by the government.
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