UK ISPA Give Police Secret Briefing and new CR&CL(UK) report lau

[Pete Mitchell]

Clare Wardle wrote:
>Nicholas Bohm wrote
>>ISPs should be no more free than banks, solicitors, doctors, accountants
>>etc to provide information about their customers as they think fit, except
>>when obliged by law by a judicially-issued warrant or a court order.
>
>Moreover if in the course of disclosing the messages to a third party such as 
>the police,they disclose personal data, which almost inevitably they will, they 
>need to check that the request to disclose meets the specific criteria of a 
>statutory ability to request information appropriate to the requesting party, 
>and that this statutory power is allowable under the Data Protection Directive, 
>or the ISP will be able to be sued by the people whose personal data it is.  It 
>is not open to ISPs or anyone else to decide to give personal data relating to 
>other people willy nilly without authorisation.  Fishing expeditions are 
>definitely out.
>

In principle yes; but in practice? I take the DPA to be next to useless
as a means of discouraging official intrusion into private data. Has
anyone ever been prosecuted, or sued, under the Act in such
circumstances? Has such a complaint ever even been logged by the
Registrar? I actually asked this question of the DPR's office a few
months ago, but never got a reply.

-- 
Pete Mitchell