Baroness Vadera Labour Peer. Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform. AKA Shriti Vadera.

Issues

Discgate

Baroness Vadera, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) supported the government's rejection of calls for a data breach notification law. Ministers back web security position 29 May 2008

"The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has put out guidance on this, but a law would be very difficult to legislate,"

News

2008-05-28 - Computing - Ministers back web security position
Author: Tom Young: Summary: Baroness Vadera, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) supported the government's rejection of calls for a data breach notification law. ... the government specifically rejected calls by the Lords to give the ICO powers to spot-check government departments' data protection policies, saying "the government believes that the current enforcement regime for data protection is fit for purpose". Less than a month later HM Revenue and Customs lost the personal details of 25 million families. The data included names, addresses and bank details.

2008-05-21 - PC Pro - Government minister takes pop at Microsoft security
Author: Barry Collins: Summary: Baroness Vadera, the parliamentary under secretary of state for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) "Microsoft's Internet Explorer automatically downloads security updates every 30 days," she claimed. "There's an interesting thing going on of a switch to an alternative, Firefox, because it does it every six days and people are beginning to get aware of that." ... "We need to find a way to raise the bar of expectation from the software industry," she claimed. "In particular, this rush to market - which has decreased famously since the Bill Gates memo [presumably referring to Gates's 2002 memo on trustworthy computing]." Vadera said discussions were taking place with the EU over software vendor liability, but that "we're not very hopeful this will be taken up." "It's quite hard to have attribution of liability... because of the way the internet works on layers," she added. "There would be massive interoperability issues. It would also be very difficult to do this on a UK level."

2008-01-30 - ZDNet - Timms replaced with 'tough' new broadband minister: Author: David Meyer; Summary: Stephen Timms has been replaced as broadband minister by Baroness Shriti Vadera, formerly of the Department for International Development. As the competitiveness minister, one of Timms's briefs had been the UK's broadband infrastructure, currently in a state of flux as the core network is being upgraded by BT and others into a "next-generation network" (NGN). He had also been dealing with more general IT issues, like training and e-commerce. The move towards "next-generation access" (NGA) — or fibre to the home (FTTH) — will pose challenges for Vadera, as it is yet to be determined who will pay for the upgrade.