Supplementary written evidence submitted
by the Information Commissioner
(To: Paul Farrelly MP)
I am writing in response to your email of 3
December to my Deputy Commissioner, David Smith. I do not want
there to be any doubt about the Information Commissioner's willingness
to engage constructively with the Select Committee's work.
I was concerned to see that you and your colleagues
felt that the ICO might have been economical with the truth so
far as the summary spreadsheets are concerned. It is important
that I first put the role of the summary spreadsheets into context.
These spreadsheets were prepared for the ICO at the time of the
original Motorman inquiry to enable us to handle the mass of evidence
that had been seized. They are not the evidence itself nor do
they contain any additional information. I can assure you that
I was not in any way trying to keep their existence from the Select
Committee when I gave evidence myself and I have been told that
the database in question was referred to when your chairman visited
our offices. However on both occasions it was the actual evidence
seized by our investigators that was the focus of attention rather
than the arrangements the ICO had adopted for its management.
It is also important to bear in mind the position
the Information Commissioner is in. It was my predecessor Richard
Thomas who went as far as he believed he could in putting information
about the activities of the media before Parliament when he published
What Price Privacy? and What Price Privacy Now? It is the Information
Commissioner who has been instrumental in exposing the activities
of the media here. We are certainly not involved in any "cover
up", but we have to operate responsibly and within the law.
I suggest that it was no part of the Information
Commissioner's responsibility to publish further material from
Operation Motorman once he had reported to Parliament in What
Price Privacy? and What Price Privacy Now? Having named the press
titles mentioned in the material recovered from the private investigators,
it was our judgement that it would have been irresponsible, disproportionate
and possibly illegal to have published the names of individual
journalists involved—or notified the subjects of individual
enquiries. We could not have done this without first establishing
in each case whether or not evidence of a Sec 55 offence existed.
To do so would have involved the investigation of each line of
journalistic enquiry to establish whether or not a public interest
defence might have been advanced. Such a speculative fishing expedition
would have been wholly unjustified and a misapplication of limited
regulatory resources at a time when there were and are very many
concerns of greater prima facie priority competing for our attention
in the data protection sphere. In the absence of such evidence,
publication would have laid the Information Commission himself
open to a charge of illegally disclosing without a lawful purpose
information acquired in the course of an investigation, in breach
of Sec 59 of the DPA.
In response to your specific questions, I can
confirm the following. The ICO spreadsheet does contain 1,027
lines of data. Line 1 contains a description of the column contents
and lines 2—1,028 contain data. In the light of this, our
column 477 contains the information referred to in your column
476 and likewise our column 558 relates to your 557.
The significance of colour coding and abbreviations
can be explained as follows. The colour identifies what information
had been obtained and the abbreviation used by the ICO to identify
that type of information obtained.
Yellow—XD (ex directory telephone numbers)
Grey—Veh Reg (registered keeper details)
Lt Green—Mob Conv (mobile conversion,
number to subscriber details)
Orange—Area (search to identify if target
lived in specific geographic location)
Dk Blue—Dir (director search at companies'
house)
Purple—conversion (BT conversion as in
mobile)
Dk Pink—F&F (BT friends and families)
Purple—CCJ (county court judgements)
Green—CRO (criminal record check)
White—Misc (telephone billing information,
company enquiries etc)
Orange—HPI (HPI check on vehicle, outstanding
finance, accidents etc)
As to any further steps, we stand by our estimate
of the response implications of carrying out a proper line by
line redaction. I can also confirm that we are still willing to
carry this out if the Select Committee can assure us that such
an exercise is necessary and consider that it would be an appropriate
use of public resources. Alternatively, we would be able to carry
out the simple column by column redaction that you have mentioned
very much more quickly.
But, in the light of what I have already said,
full redaction would result in a document which was almost meaningless
while anything less would set hares running with consequences
which might be either unfair or illegal or both.
Christopher Graham
Information Commissioner
December 2009
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