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Supplementary written evidence from the Information Commissioner (PS 153)
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 1027 lines of data. Line 1 contains a description of the column contents and lines 2 - 1028 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 |