Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1794-1799)
MR CHRISTOPHER
GRAHAM AND
MR DAVID
CLANCY
2 SEPTEMBER 2009
Q1794 Chairman: Good afternoon. This
is a further session of the Select Committee's inquiry into press
standards, privacy and libel. Once again, this is specifically
focusing on the stories that have appeared in the Guardian, both
in relation to the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire
but also into what is known as Operation Motorman, which is something
we will be focusing on in the first session. In the first session
I would like to welcome the Information Commissioner, Christopher
Graham, and David Clancy, the Investigations Manager at the Information
Commissioner's Office. Mr Graham, I believe you would like to
make an opening statement.
Mr Graham: If I may, Chairman.
Thank you. I became Information Commissioner on 29 June 2009.
In a previous life I was a journalist. My predecessor as Information
Commissioner, Richard Thomas, was very active in highlighting
the unlawful trade in confidential personal information, and he
gave evidence to this Committee on a number of occasions and your
most recent report on self-regulation of the press supported the
Information Commissioner's call for the provision of a custodial
sentence as the penalty for the most serious offences under section
55 of the Data Protection Act—obtaining, disclosing or procuring
the disclosure of personal information knowingly or recklessly,
without the consent of the organisation holding the information.
The work on this problem by the Information Commissioner's Office—the
ICO—was summarised in two reports to Parliament in 2006:
What Price Privacy? and What Price Privacy Now?
Those reports concerned breaches of the Data Protection Act, often
through what is called `blagging'—tricking organisations
into revealing confidential personal information, illegal phone
tapping and hacking. The issues highlighted by the Guardian story
of 9 July were not at issue then and would be a matter for the
police under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)
and not the Information Commissioner's Office. But, the continuing
need for an effective deterrent to serious breaches of the Data
Protection Act is underlined by the fact that the unlawful trade
in confidential personal information generally continues to flourish.
My colleague, David Clancy, who was involved in the original Operation
Motorman project, can tell you more about our ongoing day-to-day
operations, attempting to frustrate the dealers in personal data.
This is of concern to everybody, not merely celebrities or public
figures, or even journalists, Chairman. I am very ready to answer
the Committee's questions.
Chairman: Thank you.
Mr Hall: Chairman, could we have a copy
of that now?
Q1795 Chairman: You would like a
copy circulated now. We will take a copy. Can I just clarify for
absolute certainty that your Office had no involvement in the
investigation of the Mulcaire/News International activities?
Mr Clancy: We had no involvement
whatsoever, Chairman.
Q1796 Chairman: That is nothing to
do with the Information Commissioner's Office at all?
Mr Clancy: That is correct.
Q1797 Chairman: So we will focus
entirely on Operation Motorman. First of all, you will have seen
the reports in the Guardian, both of a few weeks ago and, indeed,
this week. The principal source for those seems to be your Office,
that you made available information from the inquiry to the Guardian.
Mr Graham: Not to the Guardian,
Chairman. I do not know what the Guardian's source is. It is clearly
information that originates from the ledgers and the invoices
that we collected in Operation Motorman but we, of course, are
constrained from making that information more public except for
a lawful purpose, that is section 59 of the Data Protection Act.
Apart from information we have released to the individuals who
have contacted us saying, "I think I may be on that database,
tell me about it", standard data subject requests I think
they are called, back in December 2006 we did release to a Guardian
journalist who was covering the second report, What Price Privacy
Now?, purely as illustrative material, a sample of invoices
and ledger entries, all of it redacted, simply to show that the
sort of thing that was being bought and sold was identifying people's
addresses from telephone numbers, accessing ex-directory numbers,
accessing friends and family numbers. So that information, which
we have now made available to the Committee, is particularly uninformative.
It does not tell you who the customer was, who the target was,
it just says, "Ex-directory search" and so on. That
is one source. The second source—
Q1798 Chairman: This included the
example which was originally given to this Committee by The
Guardian, that did come from you.
Mr Graham: I think whenever you
interviewed Mr Davies and he passed round some paper, that was
a sample of what had been provided. I think it featured particularly
News International.
Q1799 Chairman: Indeed.
Mr Graham: Our sample included
a wider selection of titles. It did not give details of the journalist
who was asking for the information or who the target was, or any
of the personal data. I said there was a second area in which
we had made information available and this was again, I think,
under section 59 of the Data Protection Act, the lawful purpose
being a court order in connection with solicitors acting for,
I think it was, Gordon Taylor, the former footballer, who I think
was suing the News of the World. We had to make available
under a court order a quite substantial amount of information.
I do not know whether David Clancy can help me here but I think
it was probably in ledger form.
Mr Clancy: There was lots of information
from the entire Motorman database, which included information
contained in the various ledgers.
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