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Evans telling victims of Labour’s outsourced data breach not to discuss it

Labour right’s authoritarian streak shows again, telling victims not to discuss what it’s done to them

David Evans

Labour party general secretary – fresh from his gerrymandered confirmation with the help of Unison delegates breaking the party’s own rules – yesterday sent emails to Labour members warning them that a ‘3rd party’ company – to which Labour had sent members’ information apparently without asking them – had allowed a ‘cyber incident’ and leaked their sensitive information to unknown parties.

The incident was so serious that Labour has had to involve the National Crime Agency, National Cyber Security Centre, the Information Commissioner’s Office and Parliamentary Security.

Yet Evans concludes his preamble to the notification by telling the victims of its shoddy processes that they should shut up and not discuss it, even on social media:

I would ask colleagues to refrain from any public commentary (on social media or otherwise) on this matter.

Despite the use of ‘colleagues’, this instruction appears to have been sent to non-staff

Evans clearly wanted to drive home the point, as in a subsequent email he referred back to the notification and repeats his stricture:

One outraged recipient told Skwawkbox:

I’m not a f***ing “colleague” of Evans. He works for us. We pay his wages.

The cyber-incident appears to have been a ‘ransomware’ attack, in which payment is demanded to regain access to data that has been taken or locked by criminals. So a large quantity of members’ personal and sensitive information is now in the hands of criminals – yet we still don’t know even which outsourced data handler had the data, without authorisation by the data subjects, in the first place.

But we shouldn’t be talking about it, according to the Labour regime.

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