Scores of Scottish ministers' files lost or stolen

Scores of Scottish Executive files have been lost or stolen from memory sticks, laptops and mobile phone devices, it has been revealed

Policy documents belonging to SNP ministers have also been lost in the post, stolen from a Holyrood conference room and left on a train and in a car park.

The litany of lost information has been revealed for the first time, and includes data that was “protectively marked” because of the sensitive content.


There have been 11 cases of paper documents being lost or stolen since February this year. Meanwhile, there have been 21 laptops, PCs and Blackberry mobile phones taken or mislaid over the past two years.

The Executive insisted information “should not” have been kept on these machines, but it is not know how many files were actually stored on their hard drives.

Officials stressed the missing data was more likely to include policy documents than lists of personal data, such as addresses and bank account details, that could be used to commit identity theft.

A summary released under the Freedom of Information Act shows documents that were not marked secret were left on a train in February this year and never recovered.

The following month personal data was sent to the wrong address, and only some of it eventually retrieved.

Daily Telegraph (17 December 2009)

1 comments:

StorageCraft said...

When i came to know about this news i got shocked. It is a shame on the officials to loose such an important data that to relating with the government office.