Unknown Knowns

A report by the parliamentary intelligence security committee says that staff at GCHQ have mislaid thirty-five laptops. Fortunately, there is no evidence that any of them contained secret information. Unfortunately, the reason for this is that nobody knows what was on them. MI6, which has expanded recently because of the need for people who neither condone nor encourage torture, has had some data management problems; while GCHQ has taken the Private Finance Initiative route to providing itself with a "signals intelligence modernisation programme", channelling "very large and unidentified sums" to no readily apparent purpose. The report covers a seven-month period ending last July, and has spent the intervening eight months having asterisks drawn on its sensitive parts by Gordon Brown. The former minister Kim Howells, with his sharp eye for detail, observed that this meant the report was "considerably out of date". Whether matters have improved, worsened or stayed the same in the interval does not appear to have concerned him.