Reply to post: My guess as to what actually happened

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

My guess as to what actually happened

(Anon due to prior work in this area)

As part of the EU Exit work, a lot of data had to be deleted that they were no longer allowed to keep. This was mostly relating to European Arrest Warrants and other Schengen information (https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/uk-to-lose-access-to-million-pieces-of-information-on-criminals-in-case-of-a-no-deal-brexit/)

The timing of this 'loss' would seem to match up pretty closely with the timing of the 'hit go' instructions on that deletion.

To all the people asking 'what about the backups' when you remove this data, you have to remove the data from all the live backups, the offline archives, and even references to case IDs or other protected information that might be in log files or referenced elsewhere.

From the outside a guess might be that as part of this surgical removal of EU data, some UK data might have got mixed up, and the one-way delete-all-the-backups nature of the work has put us in this situation.

Finally the article mentions testing, I would assume that an operation of this delicacy would have been well tested, but remember it was only to be actually done if there was 'no deal' (or variations there of that didn't include access to this data, like the deal we finally got) and the last minute negotiations meant that there was no clarity on this until very late in the year, at which time there is very little time left to do proper testing before the date.

Clearly the obvious answer would have been to do a lot of testing for the different possible contingencies, starting a year or two ago, so that no matter the outcome we would have a production ready solution in place. Do you really think that is what was prioritised by management?

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