Amazing they are still making this mistake

The Guardian reported:

Britain’s budget watchdog has said the early leak of its budget documents before Rachel Reeves made her speech was the “worst failure” in its 15-year history as it emerged a similar breach had occurred earlier this year.

The details of how this “leak” happened resonated with me, as I have some experience with this. Basically they uploaded the budget to their website in advance of the Budget speech, and used the same URL format as previous years. This allowed someone to guess the URL, and bingo the Budget was out early.

In the early 2000s I was an opposition staff member and we knew the official crime stats would be out that evening. I went to the Police website to grab the stats from the previous year, so I could do comparisons once they were released. I noted the URL included the date of the crime stats, and thought I would see what happened if I changed the year from 2000 to 2001. To my huge surprise the latest crime states appeared on my screen.

I printed them and rushed them to the Spokesperson. This allowed the Spokesperson to ambush the Minister with the stats at question time (and they had worsened) which caused a stir, as they were not meant to be public – so the Minister was unprepared and looked pretty foolish.

Happy with my day’s work, I moved onto other mischief. But by chance around six months later I was having dinner with a friend who worked in the Commissioner’s office. I asked him if there had been any blowback over the opposition getting the data before the Minister.

You can imagine my surprise and delight when I was told that the Minister had been apoplectic with rage, was convinced that senior police had leaked it deliberately, that the relationship between the Minister and Commissioner had been destroyed and even worse the Minister had brought in private investigators to investigate Police HQ and try and find out who leaked it.

Once I recovered from my uncontrolled laughing, I told the staffer that there had been no leak, and I simply found it on the Police website by guessing the URL. To be fair back then website publishing was less sophisticated, and not all sites had the ability to time when something was published.

Anyway the staffer told the Commissioner, and the Minister’s private investigation of Police HQ was called off. But I will admit to a warm glow about having made the Minister apoplectic with rage.

I can understand that mistake being made in 2001, but am truly staggered that a UK government agency would make the same mistake in 2025. Basically if something is embargoed, don’t publish it until the embargo time. Hoping no one guesses the URL is stupid.