Slashdot Mirror
UK Police Database Abuse 'Hugely Intrusive'
twoheadedboy writes "Police database abuse has been branded as 'hugely intrusive' after a report showed over 900 officers and staff had breached the Data Protection Act over the last three years. Furthermore, 243 police officers and staff received criminal convictions for breaking laws set down by the DPA. 'Our investigation shows that not only have police employees been found to have run background records checks on friends and possible partners, but some have been convicted for passing sensitive information to criminal gangs and drug dealers,' said Daniel Hamilton, director of the Big Brother Watch."
I'd say more News of the World has won.
You have nothing to fear from the authorities!
Right? Right? Helloooo?
And, perhaps, tabloid reporters? Or is that the same thing?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
1) if you collect data the data will be used.
2) reread 1. until you get it.
You mean that when all those people were warning us about how all that surveillance could be abused, how all the increases in police power could wind up being a problem, they were right? WOW!
Palm trees and 8
And, perhaps, tabloid reporters? Or is that the same thing?
Please, don't insult gangbangers
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Weird - I would never have suspected something like this would be going on.
Man, you Americans should really rein in your abusive cops. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. Its like you are living in a police state. You should stop voting for idiots who let this happen.
Oh, wait. Not Americans?
You mean you win by shutting your doors? OK... :-}
...custodiet ipsos custodes?
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
In the UK, if you are questioned for a major crime, even as a witness, and a DNA sample is taken, you are on the database for life. You don't have to do the crime, you have to live within a few streets of someone might have done the crime.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Right, I'll just choose never to be suspected of a crime. How could I be so blind?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Strangely no. For some years the police database has been the one database the tabloids won't touch. Everything else up to and including medical records is fine but going for the police database has historically resulted in the police carrying out investigations and no one wants that.
See Nick Davies's book flat earth news for details.
Back in college, I had a friend in an undergrad pre-med program who was doing some sort of work in the local hospital. He actually told me, unsolicited, that if I was interested in a girl he'd look her up to see if she had any STDs (I never took him up on the offer). He also wasn't shy about pointing out who had what whenever he spotted people in public. At the time, I just thought it was creepy but I wonder if that was illegal 15 years ago?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
...and, make sure your employees KNOW that their attempts to access records are logged. Continually cross-reference that info with relevant investigations.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I keep having this discussion with people again and again.
It does not matter what social, organizational, or legal controls your put in place -
It does not what technical controls, acls, encryption, strong identity validation, etc you put in place -
At some point any information stored will be either abused to facilitate some originally unintended purpose or will be leaked and subsequently abused or published by another party.
-The take home needs to be "think before you store" and we need to tell our politicians that data retention rules need to consider risk of abuse as part of the cost and that as a society we might not want take those risks even if they solve immediate problems today.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
.. have won.
This story is sensationalist scare mongering crap and belongs in the Sun and certainly not here. There are literally millions of people who work for the police in the UK so to quote a figure of 800 incidents over three years suddenly seems pretty insignificant. My partner works for the police and has advised me that every record they check, leaves a log of who they are and what crime they are looking it up in relation to and why. Anyone caught looking things up for personal reasons are sacked and sometimes prosecuted. That's where the 800 and 243 figures come from.
People are people and yes it would be nice if the police and support staff were immune to the case of human stupidity. Personally I am far more concerned about higher-up, more serious incidents like the first investigation into phone tapping scandal which found little only 'isolated cases' and only 2 people involved when clearly it turns out over 4000 cases and potentially, nearly every British newspaper. The head of the first investigation then walked into a well paid job for the very people he was investigating with the blessing of the UK government and no questions were asked.
The people who work there are going to lose out, but the owners won't. They're already planning to start up the Sun on Sunday (or something similar), what's the betting they'll use this as an opportunity to get rid of the people they don't like and hire back the ones they do at a reduced rate? And the whole Rebekah Brooks thing is a smokescreen. They know if they'd kicked her out last week it wouldn't have been enough to sate the public and James Murdoch would have been next on the hit list. What they'll do instead is keep her dangling in front of the public while everyone bays for her blood and when it gets to fever pitch they'll cut her loose and claim they've done everything that was asked of them. Ultimately the Murdoch empire won't suffer one jot over this whole mess.
It's not just in the UK.
Here in Winnipeg, Canada I know a cop who routinely looks up "the dirt" for friends. Admittedly he's done it for me once, but I felt a bit guilty (it was about my current gf I met 11 years ago) and haven't asked him to do it since.
The system works. Access is logged and monitored, and the villains do get caught at it. They're not the sharpest truncheons in the box, to be honest.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yes I'm not entirely sure what to make of that. Its also a a little odd in the sense that generally any worthwhile crime reporter will have enough contacts with the police to get tipped of to interesting stories without having to make payment beyond the odd pint of beer.
LOL They won a long time ago. I suspect that guy from Big Brother Watch is a very busy person.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
There are literally millions of people who work for the police in the UK so to quote a figure of 800 incidents over three years suddenly seems pretty insignificant. ...
like the first investigation into phone tapping scandal which found little only 'isolated cases' and only 2 people involved when clearly it turns out over 4000 cases and potentially,
Why don't you think the 800 cases aren't just the tip of the iceberg in the same way the phone tapping investigation turned out to be? After all cops have a hell of a lot more solidarity among themselves than reporters do and thus much less incentive to rat out another cop.
Anyone caught looking things up for personal reasons are sacked and sometimes prosecuted.
The problem is in the catching. It is completely impractical to check all of those audit logs unless something else happens to bring a person under investigation. As long as they keep their nose clean and stay away from looking up any "high profile" information like celebrities or major public crimes no one will even look at their audit trail much less put in all of the effort to determine if each search was legitimate. Misuse of the database is essentially unpoliceable.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There are literally millions of people who work for the police in the UK
Really? Considering that working for the police in the UK involves being a member of the UK labor force, which is just over 31million persons, you're suggesting that at least 1 in 30 of them is working for the police. And that's interpreting your "literally millions" as being just 1 million.
Actually, adding together the police force sizes for England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, one gets a total of 164,580 which is about one sixth of a million.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I have noticed this. Specifically, Walgreens has started scanning licenses for cigs and beer.
FC Closer
Right, I'll just choose never to be suspected of a crime. How could I be so blind?
Make sure you also choose to prevent suspicion ever falling on any of your neighbours, friends, acquaintances, workmates, or people who hang out in the same bars or social clubs as you. Otherwise, you're fair game for the DNA database.
It's all up to you, remember...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
to see that at least they are actually detecting and disciplining breaches, since I was already assuming the worst.
If they were to have the right security and ethical culture, it's not implausible that they have a high detection rate when running a full access log, hopefully cross-referenced to some sort of case allocation log, in which case 900 out of ~242k is less than 0.4% of staff in a 3 year period. On the other hand it is possible the 900 is only from audit sampling, in which case since the sample size is unknown the actual rate can only be anything higher than that.
Incidentally this is bigger news due to it's related nature with the News of the World investigation. Since the recent Slashdot story the "news" paper has been shut down and today there has been arrests of both the editor and a sub-editor at the time on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption allegations. The investigation and the story seems to be turning it's attention to allegations of bribes paid to the police for information, having hit what surely is as deep as the depravity goes on the phone hacking (I've said this a few times before and been proven wrong) by discovering targets included the phones of families of victims of the 7/7 London bombing, soldiers killed in Iraq/Afghanistan and murdered children.
Those were the ones who were caught ... how many got clean away with it ?
In the UK, if you are questioned for a major crime, even as a witness, and a DNA sample is taken, you are on the database for life. You don't have to do the crime, you have to live within a few streets of someone might have done the crime.
This should be changing soon (if the politicians ever get around to that Protection of Freedoms Bill) because the Courts (now both the ECHR and Supreme Court) have said that this is illegal. Unfortunately, the court decided not to do anything (like punishing the police, or demanding that data be destroyed) until Parliament had their say. ... and people say the Courts have no respect for Parliamentary Sovereignty.
[If you're really interested, I wrote something up for PPUk on this, here.]