LulzSec hacks NHS. | Hacker News Reader

LulzSec hacks NHS.

bbc.co.uk

91 pointsmartswite43 comments

I completely believe that no patient records have been compromised - because the project to put them online is so late and over-budget (to the tune of GBP 20 billion) that it's likely never to be completed.

Let me put that number into perspective: We could buy a replacement fleet of Trident submarines from the NHS IT budget alone...

The project is such a clusterfuck that Accenture UK reccused itself from it. You know it's doomed when consultants decide to leave.

Rats do leave a sinking ship, as they say.

I work at a company that implements medical IT solutions for hospitals and anything with the NHS takes 3-5 times longer than in the US and other parts of Europe.

How come? What's causing it?

I would suspect that it's because the primary mission of the NHS is to provide jobs for bureaucrats, any healthcare we happen to get is just a side effect. Same with the MoD and submarines.

Even the most incompetent bureaucrat doesn't actively want to do a bad job. And I'm pretty sure that it doesn't say "we exist to provide jobs, with healthcare as a side effect" anywhere in the NHS charter.

Gov't IT projects suck because the RFP process is the most waterfall thing in existence, meaning the project is doomed from the start. And it goes downhill from there, with absurd amounts of politics and turf-protecting on all sides.

Well you could never say it outright, could you? But consider that the last government increased the number of nurses by 10% yet doubled the number of managers. Other than shuffling paper back and forth amongst each other, what do they do?

It's a truism that a bureaucracy always seeks to expand itself. They could all be brilliant at it, but the problem is a) it takes time and b) isn't actually necessary oh and c) they are all paid a fortune to do it, including their gold-plated pensions.

Well, it's not hard to convince me that large bureaucratic organizations turn into a mess.

But the same thing happens in private industry, too. Constantly. And nobody would ever label a private bureaucratic mess as "there to provide jobs first and turn a profit second". That was my bone of contention with your post, you're mistaking generic incompetence for something more perverse.

Mmm, but corporations frequently correct for that by downsizing. Governments do it very, very rarely.

The PCS union picketed Downing Street over proposals to reduce their redundancy package from 3 years salary to 2...

"primary mission of the NHS is to provide jobs for bureaucrats"

That might be the case for the bureaucrats in the NHS (of which there are too many) but I'm pretty sure that most of the actual front line staff are there to help patients.

I am not sure that I can fully answer what the root cause is, but most of the delays are due to the various levels of approval that take forever. In addition, they are very concerned with patient information security, and have various process to work through in regards to that.

They have to work out how many Tridents they could have bought for each part of the project.

It’s wasted either way. £20bn would be much better sunk into renewables and energy independence.

Or perhaps not taken from the taxpayers in the first place?

[Edit: I am actually fairly left of center politically, but this does not mean that I am completely uncritical of what a government does with taxpayers money - and the last Labour government went insane with so many stupid projects and initiatives that we will have to live with for decades.]

It's a matter of perspective, there are shrill voices saying that if we scrap Trident all our economic woes will be over, but really there are much, much lower hanging fruit than that. A windfall tax on the big IT outsourcing firms would be a good start.

Having a salary cap for public sector employees might be another way of doing things - say the same level as the PM (£140K or so).

A more interesting scenario would be to cap all MP's pay, incl. the PM's, at the national average wage.

All that power and responsibility, and not being compensated for it could be dangerous. Wouldn't it deter anyone who wasn't wealthy from office, and/or make them vulnerable to corruption?

Serving as an MP is a privilege, not a normal job.

Make it the median wage rather than the average one and I’d agree with you.

I was quite surprised to find that the NHS uses password-less logins for its "Flexible Worker Portal":

https://erecruitment.nhsponline.nhs.uk/Portal/LoginForm.aspx

So all you need is the DoB, email address and postcode of someone, and you can view their private information. Genius.

Anonymous is the best that could ever happen for proponents of a crackdown on freedom (through/via/on the internet).

No one knows who's behind it, so no one will stand up for them, no one will complain if they get harassed and all the blaim for everything that goes wrong in the future goes to Anon/hackers. It's the perfect scapegoat for incompetence.

Does it really matter who the scapegoat is? At all? A few short years ago we had scary arab terrorists, I think they're still a bigger scapegoat than anon.

Anonymous doesn't change anything as far as excuses. If they're looking for an excuse to crack down, they can always make up an Emmanuel Goldstein.

> A few short years ago we had scary arab terrorists, I think they're still a bigger scapegoat than anon.

Both Anon and arab terrorists have carried out numerous attacks...

Awesome. Great way to cram them into the same sentence. They both start with "a", too!

We've already proven that if you put "Saddam" and "al Qaeda" in the same sentence enough times, you can convince a majority of the USA that they're buddies. Let's see if we can do it here, too.

More to the point.. I can't stand the logic of "they should quit attempting to fight for freedom because authorities will use them as an excuse to crack down". It's exactly backwards to me. You can disagree with their motives or goals or whatever but that particular logic is terrible.

> "they should quit attempting to fight for freedom because authorities will use them as an excuse to crack down"

Who's fighting for freedom? Anon is a bunch of man-children (or actual children) 'fighting the man' behind anonymity from their parents' basements in suburbia. It's not cool or heroic. I completely don't understand this mentality that what Anon is doing should be commended. It's vigilantism and there's a reason that's not good 'IRL'.

Also I don't know what 'freedom' Arab terrorists are fighting for. The common trope is that they're fighting 'Western imperialism', but that's insane -- the most worn out excuse that the Arab world has used for their lack of innovation or scientific contribution since 1100[1]. I hope you're fine getting blown up for their cause[2].

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oxTMUTOz0w (lecture from Neil Degrassi Tyson)

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qutbism

^ This is a statement of fact and yet I am being heavily downvoted. Just because the threat is overblown, does not mean it's not a real threat.

Oh please, like proponents of a crackdown on freedom need any excuses.

Or like "save the children" isn't the political slogan which always has been, and always will be, used to justify anything.

I am not sure if LuLzSec is good or bad, or a wash, in terms of how politician will use them. It does not really matter, politicians will use anything and nothing to get what they want.

But this BBC coverage is surprisingly fair. And if coverage like this becomes the norm, who knows LulzSec might actually be good for the public image of what anonymous hackers on the internet are.

This isn't Anonymous.

Not officially, anyway.

And that may be even worse when it comes to a potential "crackdown": if it is just one group of hackers running amok, putting them down solves the problem, or at least the public discourse can pretend so. But if we come to have two, three, four, or even more groups on the loose, then there is an "epidemic" that will "require" a broader, more draconian response.

Yeah it is. Everyone's Anonymous :|

Somehow I've a feeling that we're going to soon lose a lot of freedoms that we've previously had online. This further supports the argument that the internet should be 'policed and legislated' - of course this means restricting information also ... Hackers are winning right now, but in the longer term Government and Big Business will crack the whip ...

Somehow I've a feeling that we're going to soon lose a lot of freedoms that we've previously had online.

You've already lost them :| apathy is a bigger enemy than anything. As long as people have access to their netflix or amazon or whatever, they'll be ok with internet crackdowns.

Big business and government have been winning for a long time and the hackers aren't really doing enough.

The outlook for internet freedoms appears quite doomy over the next few years. Although in this case LulzSec doesn't appear to have done anything other than highlight security failings stories like this, along with the various doings of Anonymous and any other similar groups or individuals, can easily be exploited by politicians to advocate for a Chinese-style censorship regime and an end to net neutrality. Any hint that medical records might have been compromised would cause considerable public fear and alarm, which could then be channelled for political purposes.

Anonymous literally could not have asked for a better representative on the information security front. Not only are they demonstrating that nobody's information is safe right now, they're doing it in a way that gets the message across without making everybody angry at them or any other geeks or netizens. Keep up the good work.

When you use "literally" like this, it's to indicate that what follows, whilst normally metaphorical, is in this case literal. How is "asking for a better representative on the information security front" a metaphor?

The incessant misuse of the word literally, literally makes my blood boil.

(See what I did there?)

Once upon the time: http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

Eh, I've never actually heard anybody ask for something in the context of "could not have asked for". And you can always ask for something better if you're willing to go to figurative lengths. Still not really defensible, though, and I wish I could edit it now that I'm being downvoted strictly on the form of my content rather than the content itself.

I figuratively want to kiss you for this.

literally, like, amen.

Deleted comment

Not "arguably", "actually". But he literally did that on purpose.

I'm not sure they're Anonymous. Let's just say, I hope the governments of the world don't use them as an excuse to crack down on internet freedom and try to regulate it.

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