Government, BC Lottery Corporation, fumble spectacularly

If you've followed the BC government's rather spotty track record with privacy concerns in the past, then it probably won't surprise you that, once again, BC citizens can't expect their information to be kept private by a government-run project. The Vancouver Sun has the story: NDP: B.C.'s new online gambling website may have been hacked:

VANCOUVER - British Columbians’ personal information may have been compromised when the government’s online gambling website, PlayNow.com, crashed last week, according to the New Democratic Party.

PlayNow, the first government-sanctioned online casino in North America, was shut down only hours after it was launched last Thursday.

The B.C Lottery Corp. said unexpectedly high traffic caused the server to crash, so it had to be pulled down to be fixed. Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman, who is responsible for BCLC, also told CTV News on Friday that visitors’ information may have leaked.

“It does appear that some information — because of all the data hitting at once — might have been displayed on somebody’s computer, so we are dealing with that,” he said.

The NDP however, believes the website crashed because it was hacked, though it has no hard evidence to support that claim. “Experts have made assertions that hacking was a possibility,” said Shane Simpson, NDP critic for housing and social development. “But the most concerning thing is that the government and BCLC has not been definitive that there wasn’t some kind of activity that breached the security of the site.”

Read the rest. More on this from The Hook:

B.C.'s privacy commissioner has confirmed that a breach that compromised users' account details forced the shutdown of the B.C. Lottery Corporation's new online casino PlayNow.com just hours after it was launched last week. Read more here.

It doesn't end there for Rich Coleman and the BC Lottery Corporation, as The Hook reports:

NDP critic Shane Simpson challenged Rich Coleman to open up, because “the integrity and competence of the BCLC is now in question.”

BCLC was fined $500,000 by federal money laundering watchdog Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada.

BCLC president Michael Graydon blamed administrative errors for the 419 large cash transaction reports deemed late, 366 reports with clerical errors and 27 reports with imprecise information.

Transactions $10,000 and greater must be reported.

“We have the same agenda they (FINTRAC) have,” Graydon said. “We don't want money laundering in our facilities, we're in the entertainment business.”

He said BCLC will file close to 50,000 reports with FINTRAC this year.

Graydon revealed that PlayNow.com was online just six hours before it was shut down on Thursday.

Heavy traffic caused “data crossover” which compromised private information for 134 accounts, including a dozen that were seen by other players.

Read the rest. Sean Holman has more at Public Eye Online:

Let's compare and contrast: yesterday, when asked about British Columbia Lottery Corp. being fined more than $670,000 for 1,020 violations of the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Act, Solicitor General Mike de Jong told The Vancouver Sun, "Obviously the facilities are there to administer to members of the public engaged in lawful gaming activities and if some of these early reports are true, yes, it is troubling." But, last year, when confronted with allegations there was a "ton of criminal activity" at the province's casinos that wasn't being effectively targeted, the minister responsible Rich Coleman gave us a number of reasons why that wasn't the case.

Read the rest. More from Public Eye Online here. Meanwhile, Les Leyne comments in the Victoria Times Colonist: Privacy chief too soft on gambling botch. More in the Colonist from Paul Willcocks here. Michael Smyth comments in the Province here, and Adrian MacNair comments in the Post here.

Vaughn Palmer, as usual, is all over the situation in his column for the Sun: Five days late, the truth about a security breach emerges:

Even as the B.C. Lottery Corp. ' fessed up Tuesday to the truth about the crash of its online gambling site, its website continued to sing the praises of the ill-fated venture.

"A safe, secure and regulated site," Lotteries president Michael Graydon was seen to declare in a series of laudatory videos linked to the compromised PlayNow.

And so on through "highest international standards," "numerous levels of safeguards" and "all transactions monitored," unlike those nasty unregulated sites, "where there isn't the same accountability."

Meanwhile, on another part of the same site, the corporation was conducting its own belated exercise in accountability.

Read the rest. Meanwhile: Lucrative gambling profits beckon and B.C. Liberals grab more of the action.

I'm coming to this story a couple of days late, so there's not much for me to say that hasn't already been said. But I'll say it anyway: what a farce.

Seriously. This is a government that ( publicly at least ) opposed gambling until it decided to embrace it, put the same Minister - Coleman - in charge of running both the promotion and the regulation, and started trying to get as big a piece of the gambling pie as they could. They even went so far as to break gambling ground, with the first online casino in the country.

Then the online casino results in a massive breach of privacy, and it's revealed that the BC Lottery Corp. has been making a dog's breakfast of its transaction reports.

There is literally not a redeeming detail in any of this. The only thing that the BC Lottery Corp. did correctly was to inform its PayNow customers how screwed over they'd become, and how much risk they were in by trusting their information to that most shifty of all operators: a government corporation.

Somebody's head should roll. A lot of heads should roll. But, as with the Richard Wainwright situation cited above, what do you want to bet the odds that there will be a token firing and little other reform of an incompetent system?