The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

I wish the ******* in the present UK government that are determined to push ID cards upon us would read this and reflect upon it.

In unrelated news it became known that the UK government lost personal details of another 3,000,000 people, this time by exporting learner driver data to the US for processing. It’s been a while I have had to deal with the Data Protection Act, but I am pretty sure that exporting private data of UK residents to the US is prohibited under the Act because the US does not have sufficient (any?) data protection legislation (IIRC, the Act is accompanied by guidelines for data processors, in which this is explicitly spelled out), and if this is the case, then the data was lost not merely through incompetence, but because of the UK government broke the law to start with.