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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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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(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.