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Patients win choice of sharing medical records


Earlier this year, we led the concern that a new NHS data sharing plan would see every patient's medical records uploaded to a new information system without the right to opt-out. We warned at the time that patient records would be out of patient control. On Friday, the Secretary of State confirmed that this will not be the case. We have worked closely with MedConfidential and Privacy International to ensure

The snoopers charter is dead


More than a year ago, we learned that the Home Office was resurrecting it's plan to monitor every British citizens' internet use. Big Brother Watch led the charge against these plans, giving evidence to Parliament, urging our supporters to write to their MPs and being the central force in the media campaign against the so called Snoopers Charter. We highlighted how the Home Office had misrepresented the work of

Can you support Sgt Danny Nightingale?


Three weeks today, Sergeant Danny Nightingale will report to the Military Court Centre in Bulford, Wiltshire for a preparatory hearing. This is as a result of the Service Prosecuting Authority exercising its right to seek a re-trial of Sgt Nightingale. Like many people, Big Brother Watch has been dismayed at the treatment of Sgt Nightingale. Despite his conviction being quashed at the Court of Appeal,

Boom in private investigators risks avoiding surveillance regulation


Our latest report highlights the growing use of private investigators by local and public authorities, particularly the number of times they are used without RIPA authorisation. The law in the UK, particularly the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, is broadly drawn to allow evidence to be introduced in court that in other jurisdictions would not be deemed admissible. Contrasted with the fruit of the poisonous

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Civil Liberties

One week to have your say on internet safety

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Internet freedom, Online privacy, Surveillance, Web blocking | 1 Comment

In one week the Department for Education’s consultation on parental internet controls will close.

We know other groups have been organising their members to submit strong responses calling for Government to take control of the internet, enforcing a ‘default block’ option that would mean you’re not able to see some legal content without opt-ing in. Who would decide what is blocked is not known – already some political content and non-pornographic content is blocked by mobile phone operators as part of their ‘safety’ features. And no definition of ‘adult’ content has been offered by anyone promoting the idea, risking a dangerous slide into censorship. Equally dangerous, parents risk placing false confidence in technology to raise their children, assuming because the ‘filter’ is on, they don’t need to worry.

There’s also the issue – as we previously warned – that many of the network filters currently being considered require a significant level of monitoring and logging of our internet use, whereas device level filters do not.

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Calling time on the Grim RIPA

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Communications Data Bill, Councils, Privacy, Protection of Freedoms Bill, Research and reports, Surveillance, Terrorism Legislation | 22 Comments

Our latest report, ‘A legacy of surveillance‘, looks at how the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has been used by both local and public authorities in recent years.

A decade on and more than three million authorisations later, our research found how there is still a great deal of uncertainty about how and why the powers are being used – and a clear need for the Coalition to go further to protect civil liberties.

While the Coalition has changed the law to require local authorities to seek a magistrates warrant for RIPA surveillance and only to use it for serious crimes, this is not the end of the matter.

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Southampton fights to record your conversations

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Audio recording, CCTV, Civil Liberties, Councils, Data Protection, Information Commissioner, Surveillance, Technology | 2 Comments

Following our complaint to the Information Commissioner, last month Southampton Council was handed an enforcement notice for it’s policy of requiring taxis to record both audio and video of every taxi journey.

The council has now announced it will appeal the ICO’s action, despite the policy being branded invasive and disproportionate by a judge and the Information Commissioner saying it goes too far. For Southampton Council to fight in the courts for the right to record the conversation of every taxi passenger is madness.

Yet more public resources will be tied up defending a policy that has no grounding in rational thought or civil society. It’s another example of a council trying to steamroller surveillance through without paying attention to public opinion, privacy or in this case, the law.

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Are you ready to provide your fingerprint on demand?

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Emma Carr Posted in Biometrics, Civil Liberties, ID cards, Police | 11 Comments

West Midlands police are now able to ID crime suspects on the street after hi-tech fingerprint devices have been rolled out across the force.

The scanners are satellite linked to the national fingerprint database and will instantly alert officers if the scanned prints belong to a convicted criminal. Officers will then be able to cross reference the information against the Police National Computer to find out if the person is wanted by the police or courts.

It is incredibly important that police officers using this technology have reasonable suspicion that an individual has committed a crime before they are stopped. This appears to be an extension of stop and search powers already held by police officers and it is a cause for concern that this could lead to an increase in innocent individuals being stopped by police.

There is little difference between the use of this mobile technology and the use of ID cards. The latter proved to be so unpopular with the general public that the Coalition Government scrapped the plans. Only time will tell whether the same fate awaits the mobile fingerprint scanners.

The danger of data: to merge or not to merge?

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Councils, Data Protection, Databases, Information Commissioner, Privacy | 3 Comments

Big Brother Watch last year highlighted the serious shortcomings in data protection in local authorities across the country.

However, the wider issue is not only about data storage and loss, but also how datasets are held together and combined for a whole variety of purposes.

In recent weeks two incidents have highlighted how acutely sensitive information is combined and held in a single database, when there is no obvious need to do so, and that database is then lost.

In one incident, Islington Council published personal details of thousands of residents in response to a Freedom of Information request.  The Telegraph reported that names, addresses, religion, relationship status and the sexuality of 2,500 residents were published by mistake.

A similar incident was disclosed yesterday by Torbay Care Trust in Devon, which published sensitive personal details of more than 1,000 NHS staff on the internet. The details remained online for 19 weeks until it was spotted by a member of the public. The investigation estimated the spreadsheet was viewed 300 times.

Details of each person’s sexual orientation and religious beliefs were published alongside their name, date of birth, pay scale and National Insurance number. The Information Commissioner fined the trust £175,000 for the incident.

Both these cases highlight the risk of combining data. Why on earth was salary information and sexual orientation included alongside names and addresses? If there is a real need for monitoring salary and religious beliefs (and I struggle to see why there would be) then there is no need to include employee names and addresses alongside that data.

Rather than combining all the data available, only the information that’s absolutely necessary should be used – a basic principle that should underpin the way organisations deal with personal information, but is sadly missing from countless organisations. A substantial cultural shift is required to begin treating data with the care and diligence that is required to restore trust, particularly to the public sector

While fining the organisation does send a message to senior management, it is clear that some frontline staff are not taking these issues seriously and far more needs to be done to hold to account those responsible for errors and improve standards to stop small errors having a significant impact on people’s privacy.

You have the freedom to ignore idiots

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Freedom of Expression, Internet freedom, Police | 5 Comments

At a time when police resources are under significant pressure, budgets are being cut and the Olympics are underway, you’d think that the police have better things to do than arrest people for stupid postings on social media. Alas, apparently Dorset Police have time on their hands and at 2.45am swooped on Reece Messer, 17, at his home. 

Yes, what he said was hateful, detestable and idiotic. Yes, he crossed a line when he began making death threats. So take his Twitter account off him. But to have the police – according to the Police Federation the force is facing a 21% reduction in manpower – policing idiotic comments is wholly inappropriate. Was this a credible threat? Was Tom Daley seriously in fear of his safety? Visit any football ground and you’ll hear inane threats, abuse and calls for people to be assaulted. But we don’t send the police in every time.

YouTube, to use an example, has a community policing system where content is flagged as ‘inappropriate’ and then removed. Twitter could adopt the same, with offensive accounts removed if they were reported by enough users and met certain public critera. Making repeated remarks about assault would be a fairly easy standard to uphold.

Indeed, perhaps the most worrying part of this debate is that while Twitter were happy to suspend a journalist for making critical remarks about an Olympic broadcaster they left Reece’s account online.

Speaking in what has become known as the #twitterjoketrial , The Lord Chief Justice said:

“Satirical or iconoclastic or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level, quite undiminished.”

We have to accept that freedom of speech means sometimes people will use their freedom to say something unpleasant. Criminalising those who we feel have overstepped the mark is not the way to protect our freedoms, it is the sure-fire way to destroy them.

Doncaster joins the audio-CCTV club

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Audio recording, CCTV, Civil Liberties, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology | 1 Comment

After successfully challenging audio-CCTV in Oxford and Southampton, it has come to our attention that Doncaster is also pursuing audio recording in taxis.

Always-on audio recording means recording every minute of every conversation of every passenger. It is a disproportionate and intrusive policy that goes against data protection law and does little to address to the underlying threats to driver safety.

Needless to say we’ll be contacting Doncaster Council and the Information Commissioner about the scheme.

Taxi drivers should not be forced to install surveillance equipment in their cabs. Voluntary schemes and panic button systems would offer a solution to those drivers who feel their safety is at risk without forcing every cab to record passengers.

The ICO has published a CCTV Code of Practice to help local authorities and other organisations using CCTV to stay within the law. Sadly it seems an increasing number of local authorities are happy to disregard this as they pursue over-zealous surveillance policies.

Nothing but the Google truth

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Commissioner, Online privacy, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology | Leave a comment

This afternoon the ICO has confirmed that Google has not deleted all the data it collected without people’s consent during its Street View project. Google committed to delete the data in December 2010.

The ICO was wrong to insist that Google delete the data it captured, a decision that means we will never know the scale of the privacy intrusion they were guilty of. However, we now have an opportunity to explore just how sensitive the information was,

Given that Google failed to respect people’s privacy in the first place and subsequently failed to adhere to its agreement with the Information Commissioner, serious questions need to be asked to understand why Google seemingly sees itself as above the law.

The Information Commissioner is hampered by a woeful lack of powers and is forced to trust organisations to tell the truth. Given Google’s behaviour has called into question if that really is a proper way to protect our personal data, it must be right to now demand a proper regulator with the powers and punishments to fully protect British people’s privacy.

The Olympic pre-crime cover up

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Civil Liberties, Olympics, Police, Terrorism Legislation | 7 Comments

Some time ago, Big Brother Watch was contacted by a person who had just been visited by the police. Not because he was suspected of a crime or involved in one. The Police wanted to know what he was planning when the Olympic Torch Relay came to town. We’re told an 80 year old man was also visited.

This wasn’t based on any evidence something was being planned, nor had the individual been involved in anti-Olympic protests at other points on the torch relay. So we decided to find out how many others had been visited.

It turned out Devon and Cornwall visited 18 people, which seemed a surprisingly high number of people. So we decided to ask every other force in the country if they’d done the same.

On Monday this week we receieved six responses. Since then we’ve had a further ten. All the responses, with one exception, are  identical. We can only assume someone, somewhere has supplied the forces with the template response to our request, but the detail is quite remarkable for it’s tone and severity.

The forces claim that “Disclosure of the information requested would cause operational harm to [insert force name] and affect the force’s ability to fulfil the core function of law enforcement in the future”

Apparently it’s a secret that the police talk to people.

It goes on: “The release of information identifying the focus of policing activity in safeguarding public order and the prevention of terrorism could be used to the advantage of terrorists or criminal organisations.”

So anyone planning to protest during the Olympic torch relay is a terrorist now?

“To disclose intelligence, tactics and methods used to ensure the safety and security of the Olympic Torch Relay may make them ineffectual for future similar events and future Olympic Torch Relays which may pass through the United Kingdom.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re making this up, but alas no.

The fact that police forces are devoting resources to pre-crime investigations about they Olympic torch relay demonstrates how utterly out of proportion the Olympic security operation has become. Rather than investigating crimes that have actually happened, the police are wasting their time questioning people about a potential protest, something that is neither a crime nor a security risk.

Two innocent people imprisoned by communications data blunder

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Big Brother Watch Posted in CCDP, Civil Liberties, Communications Data Bill, Data Protection, Databases, Mastering the Internet, Mobile Phones, Police, Privacy, Surveillance | 2 Comments

In his latest report Sir Paul Kennedy, the Interception of Communications Commissioner details how two members of the public were arrested by police and wrongly accused of crimes because officials wrote down the wrong numbers.

Two police forces were given the wrong information by a communications service provider (CSP) which led to two people being wrongly detained and accused of crimes last year. The case is currently under investigation, but highlights acutely the risks of error in accessing communications data. Equally, it is surprising that communications data was used to detain two people without any other corroborating evidence.

The report also found one official at a council was self-authorising requests for information by acting as applicant, authorising the application and then collecting the data while 52 requests in two local authorities were not approved by someone of sufficient seniority.

There are clearly serious problems with the authorisation process that allows hundreds of errors to go undetected in almost 900 cases. Furthermore,at a time when the Government is planning to massively increase the amount of data communications service providers must keep on their customers it highlights the stark gaps in safeguards and the weakness of authorisation processes that almost never require court approval.

The report fails to offer any evidence on the effectiveness of the 494,078 requests although it is fair to say that the 11% fall in data requests has not lead to a significant increase in the crime rate, or a fall in the clean-up rate.

As the Communications Data Bill is scrutinised, the very least the public deserve is a credible justification of why we should all be treated as suspects. This report does nothing to reassure anyone about the effectiveness of safeguards or the need for further surveillance, but does highlight the real threat to privacy increased data retention poses.

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