Is an (inaccurate) national adress database a treat to privacy and sometimes personal security?

[Ian Batten]

> The Department does not want to highlight 
> the fact that its PDS system is available to over 800,000 users and 
> is thus insecure.

The nonsense about "oh well, they're all vetted" should hopefully be rendered slightly less convincing to government by mentioning Bradley Manning.  Whatever your views on l'affaire Wikileaks, one positive side-effect of it will be that governments will realise that "secrets" accessible to millions of people aren't secret at all.

By the by, back in the day, a company I was working with disabled USB and floppy ports on computers, to reduce data leakage (the argument ran that although the disabling was by-passable, it removed the "I didn't know I wasn't allowed to" argument).  One has to wonder why the US Military didn't do likewise, and whether the much-vaunted NHS security policy will do so.

ian