Jason Singh, an officer with Northumbria Police, was the ringleader of a team attacking ATMs with power tools in professional, well planned raids across Tyne and Wear.

The 23-year-old police constable even used confidential information obtained from a Northumbria Police computer to target a vulnerable woman’s £30,000 savings.

[…]

Telegraph

Yet again this a demonstration of how ‘insiders’ can misuse database information, and how the importance being able to control access to personal information should be paramount.
Now if you consider that the government is doing as much as possible to convince businesses to use NIR/ID card information as proof of identity this will allow someone somewhere to correlate bank account numbers with NIR entries. Now if your bank starts deploying fingerprint activated atm machines it will take the minimum of effort for such an insider to link NIR stored fingerprint data to a certain bank account.
In addition this shows how detailed NIR information can become ‘valuable’ in it’s own right – in order to allow secondary crimes to occur.
The ‘proposal’ (assuming it already isn’t happening) to allow departments access to each other’s data will both make it easier to accumulate disparate data and for ‘insiders’ to hide their tracks more effectively.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 2:38 pm and is filed under NIR, Privacy.