Every time you hear of some Left Wing Nut Job talking about giving the government more control, remember this: "Governments are not in Control"

Sweden's government is in crisis after a government agency accidentally leaked the entire country's personal details database by offshoring its storage without adequate safeguards. Two ministers have been fired and the entire government may fall.

Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven confirmed on Monday that private information concerning citizens of Sweden had been exposed to serious security risks after the government outsourced IT services for the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) to IBM in 2015.

IBM, in turn, left an astounding amount of information exposed to a number of unauthorized users around the world — including the names, home addresses, and photos of every member of the police, secret military units, information from the witness-relocation program, information regarding the weight capacity of all roads and bridges, and details regarding the specifications of all government and military vehicles (and their drivers).

Apparently, the transport agency mistakenly emailed their entire database of sensitive information to marketers in plain text. And upon realizing their error, the agency decided to merely ask subscribers to delete the old message and later sent out an updated one.

Spectacular as it is, the Swedish disaster is just the latest in a seemingly unending series of similar catastrophes of which the OPM records loss , Snowden defection, State Dept secret cable loss, NSA toolkit theft are but a few well known examples. The casualties flash past like milestones in a blur. Britain's NHS lost 100,000 patient records the other day. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lost his job today due to "documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm" proving he was corrupt. In an age where the media use unnamed sources to launder leaks and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is allegedly used for political surveillance no one's secrets are safe. We appear to have entered the age of digital nakedness and not even politicians are immune. Hillary was supposedly robbed of her election by Russian hackers who stole her secrets and broadcast them though some of the losses may actually have been due the DNC's own careless selection of fraudsters to run their IT operation.

When the Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State runs her own unsecured private server for all her messages, when the Obama Administration uses the NSA to spy on its political opponents, when the Democrats in Congress hire a criminal Pakistani family to run it's IT services, and the Edward Snowden data leaks that have rocked the entire US government, the idea that giving the government even more control is positively scary.

These people are NOT the "best and the brightest,"  and they are not to be trusted.

Here is a list of the top ten (so far) biggest government data breaches.

10. State of Texas: 3.5 Million Affected (April 2011)
9. South Carolina Department of Revenue: 3.6 Million Affected (October 2012)
8. Tricare: 4.9 Million Affected (September 2011)
7. Georgia Secretary of State Office: 6.2 Million Affected (November 2015)
6. Office of the Texas Attorney General: 6.5 Million Affected (April 2012)
5. Virginia Department of Health Professions: 8.3 Million Affected (May 2009)
4. U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM): 21.5 Million (June 2015)
3. U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs: 26.5 Million Affected (May 2006)
2. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): 76 Million Affected (October 2009)
1. U.S. Voter Database: 191 Million Affected (December 2015)

Hillary famously claimed she understood the implications of artificial intelligence and robotics but does she really? Did the Swedes really? It's entirely possible that, despite their show of outward confidence no one fully understands the changes we've unleashed, least of all politicians nurtured in bureaucracy. The death of privacy appears to be an externality of the information age just as pollution was the unintended consequence of the industrial revolution. Nobody knows how much it will cost and the elite doesn't know how to deal with it.

Though governments pretend to be in control the facts suggest otherwise. Part of the problem is the government's habit of power. They've had it for so long they think it is theirs by right. Bureaucrats want the public to remain unprotected by encryption, the better to keep the public safe, though probably the better to keep everyone under control. And they're not succeeding. ...