John O'Mahony (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Question 1372: To ask the Minister for Defence the procedures in place to ensure that personal data stored by his Department is secure. [30127/08]

Willie O'Dea (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)
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Personal data held in electronic form in my Department and the Defence Forces is protected by the application of a stringent security policy, on access controlled servers, with mandatory features such as password protection, user authentication, assignment of rights to designated users only, the installation and monitoring of firewalls and other protective hardware. Daily backups by way of offsite secure data storage ensure that data is both protected and recoverable on demand. Encryption is used as necessary and data transmission is via secured links only. All physical files containing personal data relating to staff and external parties are retained in secure locations under restricted access procedures.

All data is maintained under the terms of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003, as amended from time to time. Any request for the release of such data is dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of Information Acts, 1997 and 2003, as amended from time to time.

John O'Mahony (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Question 1373: To ask the Minister for Defence the number of laptop computers, data storage devices and USB memory sticks that have been stolen or lost from his Department in 2007 and to date in 2008; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [30142/08]

Willie O'Dea (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)
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In relation to my Department no officially issued computer desktops, laptops or other data devices, such as blackberries and memory keys, have been reported lost, missing or stolen in 2007 and to date. All portable devices are issued on foot of a business requirement authorised at senior level and are recorded, tracked and maintained in accordance with the Department's ICT Security Policy and procedures certified to ISO27001 standard.

In relation to the Defence Forces, two desktop computers were stolen in 2007 from a Defence Forces installation during the UNMIL mission to Liberia and were not recovered. The PC's were on a restricted network and all data was on network drives rather than the PC's hard disk, so no compromise of data arose.