Chapter 4

[Ian G Batten]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Watkin Simon wrote:
> privacy violation".  But, if I remember correctly, we did establish that
> there have been three police officers from one force dismissed for abuse of
> the PNC and such like

All I know about statistics is that most naive interpretations of
clustering are wrong, but I would venture to suggest that there is a
crtical, quite small, number of disciplinary cases you would need to
have in one force to make zero in other forces hard to credit.
Allegations of people using the PNC or the DVLC/A computer for
unauthorised purposes have been floating around for years: Private Eye
alleged decades ago that a London casino was getting the plates of cars
visiting its competitors looked up.  And it's fairly obvious that a lot
of the things that ``private detectives'' of the ex-police variety claim
to be able to do require getting lookups on supposedly secure
databases. 

You know that problem when you find that an item you've picked up in the
supermarket isn't correctly on the computer, and you get the pantomime
of being asked if you remember the price, followed by someone running
off to find out?  My proposal is that each time that happens the
customer gets it free and the price is knocked off the supermarket IT
director's pay.  I believe that the problem would be 99% fixed within a
few weeks.  

Likewise, if security of government databases which contain private
information were made a strict liability matter for a senior manager ---
as in ``any authorisation containing your signature turns out to be
hooky, you go to jail, anyone doing a probe without authorisation, they
go to jail'' --- you can bet the authorisation regime would be tighter
than you can imagine within hours of the first door slamming shut on the
first offender.  Pour encourager les autres, etc.

> and another nine that had been "required to resign".

Which is no punishment at all, really.

> I'd like to think actually we're moving beyond discipline procedures, and
> that rather than sacking people they should be prosecuted first.

Is that your view, or is it shared by the Home Office?  The cozy world
of police disciplinary processes hardly fills ones with joy.

ian