Sunday People 26/3/2000: "FORGET YOUR PASSWORD... END UP IN JAIL"

[Ross Anderson]

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On 27 Mar 00, at 12:51, Gerard Freriks wrote:

> Are there any provisions for physicians?

David Hansen replied:

> The government view on doctors was expressed well in the infamous 
> Zergo report on encryption in the NHS network that recommended 
> the Red Herring system, despite the rest of the report providing no 
> convincing arguments for it.

The NHS is still trying to get GAK to work. Fortunately, neither they
nor their `approved' suppliers are competent enough to.

> A future Dr Shipman will be able to say, "I didn't prescribe the
> drugs, the customs did while impersonating me".

It gets worse. Back in 1995 the BMA had a row with the Department of
Health when civil servants decided that they needed to put in a data
feed from the Prescruption Pricing Authority in Newcastle to the Home
Office, allegedly so that prescribing of opiates could be monitored.
We got told this sob story about bad doctors prescribing lots of
heroin and then flogging it off.

Did they pick up Shipman? No way.

The BMA was concerned at the time that the real reason was to track
illegal immigrants. (You can get the rest of the background etc from
the papers on my web page.) I suppose it never occurred to any of us
to ask for evidence that any useful purpose would be served - there
is just no expectation that when the Home Office says `we need X to
stop Y', that the incidence of Y will be affected.

Ross