Via the No2ID blog comes this Silicon piece:
Lieutenant general Sir Edmund Burton, a key advisor to the Cabinet Office on information assurance issues, said that with the exception of the police, defence and intelligence communities, public servants have little grasp of information security threats. “What keeps me awake at night is that, with some notable exceptions, across government there’s too little awareness of the scale and breadth of the risk facing us at the moment,” he said.
Not to worry, though:
A senior member of the Cabinet Office’s Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA), whose remit is partly to oversee the effective transmission of data threat information between public sector organisations…said: “Senior civil servants will eventually be succeeded by people who grasp technology issues. People in that generation of senior civil servants are less adept at technology than people who’ve grown up with it.”
Ah, so we’re relying on the magic ‘technology’ gene that the younger generation is alleged to possess.
Two immediate thoughts on this fatuous statement:
(a) doing a lot of driving doesn’t actually qualify anyone to be a car mechanic – ‘adept’ at messing around on computers doesn’t equal ‘adept’ at security engineering and
(b) um, are we meant to let the government just muddle through with our personal data until this golden age of IT systems security literacy arrives?
The ARCH Blog 
Yes the CSIA seems to believe that there is a finite limit to the technology so that suitably gene-equipped civil servants will appear. and catch up.
Do you think there’s a plan to GM some civil servants?
I remember when I could program the video, then either I lost the gene or the technology marched on, now I don’t have a video and I couldn’t program it if I had one.
Meanwhile the public have all had a little bit more of their liberty eroded, while civil servants play dumb.
It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? Just imagine the scene: the whole of the critical national infrastructure is about to implode, and someone says: “I say, pop up to accounts and get young Clutterbuck down here. He knows a thing or two about computers.”
As for playing perpetual games of IT catch-up with the next generation…