A number of serving or former military personnel whose personal and financial details were on a laptop stolen in Birmingham last month are considering suing the Ministry of Defence under the Data Protection Act.
More than 600,000 names of those who had either joined the RAF, Royal Navy or Royal Marines or expressed an interest in doing so since 1997 were on the unencrypted hard-drive taken from a parked car on January 9. The information also included thousands of home addresses, individuals' bank details, passport and National Insurance numbers, leading to fears of identity theft or the targeting of armed forces' personnel by terrorists.
The MoD then admitted that two other laptops containing similar recruitment information dating back as far as 1969 had also gone missing in 2005 and 2006. Neither has been recovered.
One, stolen in Edinburgh, contained details of 500 soldiers, while the second, taken in Manchester a year later, held naval and RAF enlistment data. The MoD has now sent warning letters to everyone it believes might be at risk, although, as reported by The Herald this week, many of these letters arrived at out-of-date addresses.
One potential victim who contacted the paper said: "Having had my details confirmed as being on the laptop, including some very personal data, I am now making a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner and wish to seek legal action against either the MOD or the individual responsible for losing the laptop."
A second, who originally enlisted from Eire, added: "My case is already in the hands of my lawyers. The MoD had no right to allow anyone to be so cavalier with personal details."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article