British Judge Uses Personal Email To Send Details of Sensitive Court Case (theregister.co.uk)

New submitter evolutionary shares a report from The Register: Concerns have been raised over a British judge's use of his personal email address to send out a ruling in a family court case, which contained sensitive personal information. The Register has seen evidence that the judge in question used two personal accounts to send out a draft ruling and final ruling: one using a domain owned by his son and another email account associated with iCloud. The use of personal email seems highly unusual - with all government departments subject to the mandatory guidance for securing government email. [One legal expert, who asked not to be named, told The Register that the judge's behavior raised a number of issues such as a possible breach of mandatory standards, and "may pose a risk to the organization he works for and those he interacts with outside the organization."

evolutionary adds: "The article doesn't specify the tone suggests emails sent were unencrypted."

Comments

Judge probaly did nothing wrong - a defence

[outlawuk]

The Gov in the UK set up a free email system for lawyers which allows the sending of 'Restricted' level material, which in reality is everything generated in the criminal justice system. In order to defend clients and receive electronic material from the Crown Prosecution Service, or to prosecute as a self-employed independent prosecutor, it is necessary to obtain a secure Gov email address. Not always easy, the system has many issues, is slow and has a tiny mail storage allowance. The significant feature of the system though is that you can ONLY send to or receive from other systems with 'Restricted' (or the newer 'Confidential' level) access. So cjsm.net can contact other CJSM users, police.pnn.uk, any gsi.gov.uk (also gsi-x ) address etc. but you Cannot contact ordinary people. Legal Aid has been removed from many (most) classes of criminal/civil/family hearings, due to cuts, which leads to a truly desparate situation for many, so it is likely that the parties in this case were ordinary unrepresented clients who obviously would not have access to a 'Restricted' level email service. In fact not all lawyers use it either. There is a valid question about security in that anything sent via secure mail is stated to be subject to potential for being read by others. GCHQ? MOJ? Their contractors? Encryption by the user is absolutely forbidden. When I last looked, the webmail encryption was using old/poor quality/deprecated versions. Consequently many private lawyers just refuse to use the Gov email system. The MOJ were encouraging lawyers to use the CJSM system generally for their day to day inter-firm communication, but for this reasons I believe the idea died a quick death. Apart from that security concern, most judgments of the Courts are available to the public in any event, albeit family proceedings with childrens names would not. What I am trying to explain is that the Judge has probably not done anything wrong. Judges do have their own, parallell, 'restricted' email system and I'd be reasonably confident that it works exactly like the cjsm.net system, hence in order to email something to a litigant-in-person, the only way to do it would be via ordinary email. Fax is often no longer an option because of a recent slash-and-burn policy to remove every fax machine in Government existence! Quite crazy reaqlly. I suppose client/litigant consent would be relevant. Did the judge ask if they were content? Judges are often criticised for lack of understanding of the World and lack of diversity and I firmly believe that in some cases the correct applicants are not being appointed, but in this instance I suspect this is an unfair criticism, directed at an easy target that cannot answer back.