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What makes you think that? They never pursued BT when it wiretapped tens of thousands of it's customers internet connections for precisely the purpose of tracking (Phorm) in order to monetize the customer's clickstream data. See https://nodpi.org/ for the full extent of the ICO's inaction. To this day, no one has ever been prosecuted over that breach -- and it now seems clear why -- there was endemic apathy towards privacy from all levels of government, police and the CPS. And we now see why with the News of The World scandal -- the people we trusted to protect us from such breaches were benefiting too greatly from invasions of privacy to ever actually do anything to stop them or prosecute offenders.

This is exactly what NoDPI have been trying to do (with some success) over the past 2 years:

https://nodpi.org

Just a quick update for everyone. Today we have sent a letter of complaint to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) that Phorm's statement to markets this week that government regulators and departments support their technology as fully compliant with UK law - is misleading and possibly fraudulant.

I have added a link and summary to my firehose here:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=4200429

you can find the original article here:

https://nodpi.org/2009/04/17/phorm-protests-berr-says-we-are-fully-compliant/

Alexander Hanff

If you would like more information on Phorm/WebWise, NoDPI.Org has been leading the campaign against them for the past 14 months (and were co-signatories to the Open Letter). We have worked on a number of iniatives including organising the House of Lords Round Table Event which Sir Tim Berners-Lee attended on the 11th March this year. We plan to take the lobby all the way to Brussels and the campaign has already led the European Commission to initiate legal proceedings against the UK Government after they failed to enforce EU Privacy Directives with regards to Phorm's covert trials with BT Group in 2006/2007. I also filed a criminal case with the police in July last year, which they closed stating that there was no criminal intent and it was not in the public interest. As a result of this I was forced to contact the Director of Public Prosecutions and bypass the police entirely - the Crown Prosecution Service are now investigating the matter and will make a decision on whether or not to prosecute. The covert trials in 2006 alone intercepted over 130 million communications over less than 2 weeks and modified those communications to insert Javascript into web pages which passed through their systems (then known as PageSense). I leaked an internal BT report which goes into a great deal of detail about the 2006 trials to WikiLeaks last summer and I also wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the legal implications of the same covert trials.

You can find the dissertation here: https://nodpi.org/documents/phorm_paper.pdf
You can find the leaked report here: https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Image:BT_Report.pdf
And you can catch up on the entire scandal on our blog here: https://nodpi.org/

Hope that clarifies things for those who are not aware of who/what Phorm/WebWise are/is.

Alexander Hanff

If you would like more information on Phorm/WebWise, NoDPI.Org has been leading the campaign against them for the past 14 months (and were co-signatories to the Open Letter). We have worked on a number of iniatives including organising the House of Lords Round Table Event which Sir Tim Berners-Lee attended on the 11th March this year. We plan to take the lobby all the way to Brussels and the campaign has already led the European Commission to initiate legal proceedings against the UK Government after they failed to enforce EU Privacy Directives with regards to Phorm's covert trials with BT Group in 2006/2007. I also filed a criminal case with the police in July last year, which they closed stating that there was no criminal intent and it was not in the public interest. As a result of this I was forced to contact the Director of Public Prosecutions and bypass the police entirely - the Crown Prosecution Service are now investigating the matter and will make a decision on whether or not to prosecute. The covert trials in 2006 alone intercepted over 130 million communications over less than 2 weeks and modified those communications to insert Javascript into web pages which passed through their systems (then known as PageSense). I leaked an internal BT report which goes into a great deal of detail about the 2006 trials to WikiLeaks last summer and I also wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the legal implications of the same covert trials.

You can find the dissertation here: https://nodpi.org/documents/phorm_paper.pdf
You can find the leaked report here: https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Image:BT_Report.pdf
And you can catch up on the entire scandal on our blog here: https://nodpi.org/

Hope that clarifies things for those who are not aware of who/what Phorm/WebWise are/is.

Alexander Hanff

A big day for privacy in the UK. Here is NoDPI's response to the EU Commission's statement : https://nodpi.org/2009/04/14/eu-commission-starts-legal-action-against-uk-gov-over-phorm/

I know the article here was linked directly to WikiLeaks and not my web site; however it appears part of my initial interpretation of the report regarding charity ads being hijacked was inaccurate.

I retracted that part of the article yesterday morning and have since received notification from BT PLC and Phorm's Legal Counsel that the ads discussed were purchased by Phorm for the technical trial.

The revised article is here:

http://nodpi.org/?p=10

My public apology for the misinterpretation is here:

http://nodpi.org/?p=11

I would be grateful if people could edit their comments accordingly (for fairly obvious reasons).

Alexander Hanff

I know the article here was linked directly to WikiLeaks and not my web site; however it appears part of my initial interpretation of the report regarding charity ads being hijacked was inaccurate.

I retracted that part of the article yesterday morning and have since received notification from BT PLC and Phorm's Legal Counsel that the ads discussed were purchased by Phorm for the technical trial.

The revised article is here:

http://nodpi.org/?p=10

My public apology for the misinterpretation is here:

http://nodpi.org/?p=11

I would be grateful if people could edit their comments accordingly (for fairly obvious reasons).

Alexander Hanff

Oh and for the record, I am the one who released the report to the public domain. You can read more about it here: http://nodpi.org/