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RobotMonster writes:
"The Guardian reports that a vast database containing the full names, nationalities, location, arrival date, and boat arrival information for a third of all asylum seekers held in Australia -- almost 10,000 adults and children -- had been inadvertently released by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in one of the most serious privacy breaches in Australia's history.
The disclosure of the database is a major embarrassment for the federal government, which has adopted a policy of extreme secrecy on asylum-seeker issues. As the department is likely to have breached Australia's privacy laws, it will be interesting to see what the repercussions are for the people who should be held responsible."
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Australia's Asylum-Seeker Database Leaked
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(Score: 0) by GungnirSniper on Friday February 21 2014, @08:05PM
Am I too cynical, or was this a rogue release to force the state to accept these asylum seekers, now that this release increases their risk of persecution in their homelands?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by tbuddy on Friday February 21 2014, @08:19PM
I'd go with Hanlon's Razor [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mwvdlee on Friday February 21 2014, @09:06PM
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by government abuse of power.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by randmcnatt on Friday February 21 2014, @08:23PM
Just try 'patient data accidentally released' or something similar on Google and see how many hits you get. This kind of thing happens all too frequently, from sheer incompetence.
The Wright brothers were not the first to fly: they were the first to land.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tbuddy on Friday February 21 2014, @08:45PM
The sheer number of offices who have to follow HIPAA standards that have 40+ people with the same login, default passwords on home great network equipment, and any other security practices that should have been given up a decade ago are staggering. If that's not bad enough at least a few times a year you'll read about gobs of medical records popping up from laptops getting stolen from cars. I'd guess most who are willing to smash your car window aren't breaking high level security, so you know it is a case of double stupidity.
I think a big part of it is in the same vein as pollution. There is no financial incentive to have great security in the health sector the same as their isn't an incentive to be green in manufacturing. The fines, if any, aren't worth the costs involved and people in the insurance business especially know cost-risk analysis.
(Score: 1) by SMI on Friday February 21 2014, @08:57PM
I've heard of a doctor carrying all of his patient's records on a flash drive around his neck. Yet another good argument for widespread adoption of strong encryption...
(Score: 2) by ticho on Saturday February 22 2014, @11:17AM
Won't help - that doctor would just have the encryption passphrase written on the side of that flash drive. Alas, you can't fix stupid.
(Score: 1) by forkazoo on Friday February 21 2014, @10:57PM
It's certainly not a crazy idea. OTOH, somebody doing it just for the lulz, purely by incompetence, or in order to promote harassment of people to prevent them from getting asylum are probably all equally plausible on the face of it. Given that this is referred to as an "inadvertent release" "on the department's web site," I'd be inclined to say it was just a genuine screwup. If they thought they could blame somebody, they almost certainly would.
The mentality of "it all goes on 'the' server" is pretty common, and it can lead to exactly this sort of thing. If I had to guess, there is either a database that is meant to be secure, but accessible remotely with valid credentials that got accidentally exposed, or else there is a shared network storage that is used for the web server which is used as a a drop box type location, and the wrong file was copied there either by a misunderstanding of the purpose of the storage, or a simple fat fingering.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by glyph on Saturday February 22 2014, @03:08AM
It doesn't sound anywhere near that simple. It's not a case of the wrong file in the wrong place, or lax database security. Apparently, the data was embedded in documents that are supposed to be public.
People will have downloaded these documents without knowing the refugee data is included. The reports are coy about how the data was embedded, but apparently you do need specialised software to access it. Either way, embedding secret data in public documents doesn't sound like a normal slip up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2014, @01:04AM
No, you are not being too cynical in the current climate. There is a war going on and like all modern wars it is not declared fought in secret forever dipping in and out of the news of the day right in front of everyone.
Specific groups of people have been trying to enter australia by any means possible with the specific goal of increasing their numbers for which since 2007 they have been highly successful; society in australia is changing and with more people coming in they are slowly influencing every day life. Right now they are not allowed to enter the country. They are very upset [theguardian.com] about this. Unfortunately for them the Christian people of PNG are more direct. So is the australian government [theguardian.com]. The Australian [theguardian.com] has a lot of information about this.
It would not be too surprising to find a bleeding heart inside the australian government looking for an opportunity to advance the cause of people who arrive in australia by boat.
The dept of immigration has tight controls over production servers, this information should not have been anywhere near a production web server let alone linked
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:14AM
quite possibly
I wonder if the database includes people who have sexually assaulted others or threatened to sexual assault others [news.com.au]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sparrowhawk on Saturday February 22 2014, @03:40AM
Watching ABC TV (our national carrier) in Australia just a few days ago, a prominent Human Rights Lawyer (refugee representative) stated that if the identity of a refugee became known, that in itself would be sufficient to trigger permanent protection, for fear of persecution if that person were returned. The proximity of these very public comments to the time of the breach, will certainly seem suspicious to many.
(Score: 1) by Popeidol on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:12AM
That is a very interesting angle. The Australian Government has been getting some attention from the UN over our harsh treatment of refugees, and how they respond to this will probably be closely scrutinized by the international community. If the government's own incompetence has increased the danger these people are in, that puts them in a very difficult position: If they continue as they are now they could face serious consequences, but if they do the humane thing they look weak to many of the hardline supporters they've built up with the current policy.
(Score: 1) by qwade on Sunday February 23 2014, @11:21PM
ooh - conspiracy theory time - let's say you worked in federal government and were one of the decent sort that sees asylum seekers as actual people instead of the invasive force of freeloaders that the media paints them as and are actually trying to help. So if you "accidentally" let out the information that would identify an asylum seeker, they would be more or less guaranteed to get asylum ...