{"id":201,"date":"2007-08-14T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-14T17:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/2007\/08\/14\/report-of-investigation-into-uk-visa\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T18:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:49:08","slug":"report-of-investigation-into-uk-visa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/2007\/08\/14\/report-of-investigation-into-uk-visa\/","title":{"rendered":"Report of the investigation into the UK visa breach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The results of the two-month independent investigation into <a href=\"http:\/\/sanjibmitra.blogspot.com\/2007\/05\/identity-leakage.html\">security breaches<\/a> of the UK visa application process from India, Nigeria and Russia were published towards the end of July.<\/p>\n<p>The full report is available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fco.gov.uk\/Files\/kfile\/IndependentInvestigation26July2007.pdf\">here<\/a> (currently archived, see Update below). There were also articles by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2007\/08\/11\/uk_visa_site_investigation\/\">The Register<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/observer.guardian.co.uk\/politics\/story\/0,,2137150,00.html\">The Observer<\/a> in the UK media that covered the publication of this report. In India, there was no media coverage that I am aware of.<\/p>\n<p>The excellent and very comprehensive report speaks for itself, and I would recommend it as good holiday reading if you&#8217;re a fan of non-fictional tragic comedies spanning multiple continents. Thats probably exactly what the UK Members of Parliament did, taking a copy of the report with them as they broke off for a 11 week summer recess shortly after it was presented in Parliament.<\/p>\n<p>In the limited time provided, I thought that the appointed Independent Investigator prepared quite a detailed and thorough report. The only striking omission I noticed was any plausible explanation as to why this breach wasn&#8217;t reported by more applicants considering that this website had such fundamental flaws and left vulnerable for such a long duration of time. A little research into the Indian psyche, perhaps by way of interviews with applicants would have shown that no right thinking, progressive, frequent-flying, peace-loving Indian would ever want to bite the hand that stamps their visa.<\/p>\n<p>I even know individuals in India who would consider themselves famous if their personal details were exposed online! Such is the scale of ignorance towards identity abuse here.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> The link for the full report isn&#8217;t available on the FCO website any longer and claims to be moved to the &#8216;National Archive&#8217; if you click it. I&#8217;ve still retained the above link though, to show that the National Archive seems to have misplaced its copy of the report too. Hmmm. However, it can still be found <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statewatch.org\/media\/documents\/news\/2007\/jul\/uk-visa-security-report.pdf\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The results of the two-month independent investigation into security breaches of the UK visa application process from India, Nigeria and Russia were published towards the end of July. The full<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-think"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}