The British government is to data protection as Hurricane Katrina was to New Orleans property values. In the past we have covered the loss of data, including bank details, for 25 million people, and government intelligence documents seem to repeatedly get left on trains or in bars. Now, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has announced that a memory stick containing information on thousands of individuals in the criminal justice system has also gone walkabout.

I'd be lying if I said the UK has a good record when it comes to government IT projects. Each time a minister gets a bright idea about using technology to help streamline bureaucracy, the end result is a multibillion-pound transfer of wealth from taxpayers to management consultants, who then spend years overspending, overpromising, and under-delivering.

Last time around, the data loss involved someone making a copy of data they weren't supposed to, and then mailing it to another department. This time round, a consultant for PA Consulting copied files containing records on all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales onto a USB drive, which then got lost.

The government does actually have rather strict rules about how such data should be stored and managed, and downloading it from secure servers onto thumbdrives or CDs isn't allowed, but the fact that it keeps happening suggests that either no one is paying attention, or that the procedures for handling sensitive data aren't working.

If I were still a UK resident, I'd be feeling even less happy about the impending introduction of biometric ID cards. Despite repeated assurances that the cards will be tamperproof, I think it's obvious to anyone other than a Labour minister that they're only going to make ID theft even simpler than it already is.

Meanwhile, opposition politicians are calling for heads to roll. Just one more woe for an increasingly beleaguered government.