Typeface of doom
Continuing the theme of picking out only the least relevant, most trivial details from the Mother Of All Data Cock-Ups for attention, I would like to point out that the emails (PDF) released today give us a vital insight into how such a catastrophic failure could have happened. Not, as others have surely noted, the fact that the requirements of the Data Protection Act are never mentioned by any party; nor that the contracting-out of services in government has gone so far that not even the most basic action can be taken without a third party being necessary, and the absurd cost implications associated with it; nor even that nobody in an organisation devoted solely to handling data appears to have any understanding or ability whatsoever when it comes to actually handling data that their own system has given them.
No. The most salient fact is this:
ONE OF THE KEY PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE USES COMIC SANS AS THEIR DEFAULT EMAIL FONT.
I’ve warned you about those people, and did you listen? Did you listen, you crazy fools? No!
Updated to add: In a more-serious-but-still-highly-amusing note, Ben Laurie points out that the redactions in the PDF aren’t actually good enough to conceal the names of the individuals involved, if anybody really wanted to find out who they were. Nice to know that HMRC are as incompetent at protecting their own ID data as they are with other people’s…
