Criminals use the database state too

nick cowen, 6 February 2008

A terrorised pensioner died of a heart attack during an attack on his home in a dispute over a parking space at a supermarket. What makes this story especially worrying is that a policeman (and friend of the defendants) traced the 79-year-old by his car registration number, using the police national computer database. There is no word in the news on what legal action the policeman will face, which is strange considering that accessory to manslaughter would be appropriate.

This criminal misuse of officially private but widely accessible personal information is an increasing occurrence. The Centre for Social Cohesion’s recent report, Crimes of the Community, documented several instances when young women have fled honour-based violence in the family home, only to be tracked down via informal family networks spanning taxi services, the police and civil servants often using national databases used by public sector workers. From p95 of the report:

[W]omen have been tracked down through family members working in Job Centres accessing their National Insurance (NI) data which indicate where they are collecting their benefits. The Asha Project in Streatham recorded one case when an 18-year old Pakistani Muslim woman was almost abducted from a Job Centre as she went to sign-on after her relatives accessed confidential National Insurance information. Ila Patel, director of the Asha Project in South London, says:
“She went to sign on, and the family was there, and abducted her. Luckily her boyfriend was there and immediately alerted the police.”

In cases such as this, it would actually be relatively easy for the public sector to take steps to protect people who have already been established as vulnerable. It would be a simple matter of associating all national records of that person with a higher level of clearance in order to be accessed. This way, not absolutely anyone working for the Department for Work and Pensions, the Police, the National Probation Service, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency… (the list goes on for a surprisingly long time)… would be a potential leak of that individual’s whereabouts. Instead those records would have to be accessed by a more experienced and more trusted employee, such as a manager at a Job Centre rather than a relatively recent recruit.
Of course, this would not protect people who are not yet known to be vulnerable but it would be a start. Furthermore, any workers who deliberately leak information to parties who intend or go onto commit criminal acts should face immediate dismissal and criminal prosecution themselves. In the long-term, it should be considered whether it really is good security practice to give public sector employees (who are, after all, mere humans with their own interests and connections) access to such large chunks of private information.
That a policy along those lines has not been implemented demonstrates quite how seriously the state takes being made an accessory to abduction and (now) manslaughter: they are not “bovvered”. In such a context, it is hardly surprising that a growing proportion of the public are opposing the next stage in the database state: national ID cards.