A recent story in the Irish Independent Newspaper reveals that a senior manager within the Department of Social and Family Affairs has resigned after having being discovered providing newspapers with personal information belonging to people who provided that information in confidence to the department.

It appears that this was not a unique occurence and investigations within the department revealed that this senior manager revealed the personal information of a number of high profile individuals to the media.

This story comes on foot of recent revelations of a civil servant who revealed personal information on a number of individuals to his criminal brother, who in turn robbed one person and extorted money from three others.

These activities are very serious and are clearly in breach of the Irish Data Protection Act.  However, as there are no data security breach disclosure laws here in Ireland, details on these stories only came to light as a result of journalists submitting Freedom Of Information requests.

These cases are a prime example of why we need to introduce breach disclosure laws here in Ireland and hopefully will reinforce calls I made to the Irish Government as part of Global Security Week to introduce such laws here.

You can see my earlier post regarding the earlier privacy breach here.