“Ministers have been accused of a ‘massive failure of duty’ after thousands of criminals’ details, stored on a computer memory stick, were lost. The missing device includes un-encrypted details about 10,000 prolific offenders. It also includes the including names, dates of births and some release date of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales – and a further 33,000 records from the police national computer”.

Of course, the fashionable knee-jerk response from many hearing this new this morning will almost certainly have been ‘it doesn’t matter, they’re only prisoners – they don’t have any rights anyway’ etc. Which is, of course, ‘a point of view’.

But whatever your views about whatever rights prisoners might not have, don’t you think their families have rights ? Their children ? Might you not think a five year old child – whatever it’s parent might have done – has the right not to be the subject of a hit from, say, a rival criminal gang ?

Even if you don’t think that – might you think subjecting the families of criminals whose personal data has been lost in this way to potential criminal attack themselves is not a total waste of police time ?

In other news, the BBC news website also has a handy aggregation page of other epic cases of government data loss.

“ID cards – do you still think they’re a good idea ?”