A Secret Shared Is Not A Secret Halved
I guess I’ll never be a comedian–I don’t do things in the right order.
Here’s the punchline: Safety fears over new register of all children. “It will be available to an estimated 330,000 vetted users. Some of those allowed to check records, such as head teachers, doctors, youth offender and social workers, are uncontroversial, but critics have questioned why other potential users, such as fire and rescue staff, will have access to the database.”
Erm, why is this level of access uncontroversial?
Here’s the set-up:
Five civil servants who help run the national DNA database have been suspended after being accused of industrial espionage. It is alleged they copied confidential information and used it to set up a rival database in competition with their employers, the Government’s Forensic Science Service.
A civil servant who was paid thousands of pounds to rubber stamp passport applications for illegal immigrants and a drug dealer was jailed for two years and two months today.
An internal investigation at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has found that civil servants are colluding with organised criminals to steal personal identities on “an industrial scale”. Ministers have been privately warned that the investigation will show that hundreds of thousands of stolen personal details have been ripped off from official databases, often with inside help. Key personal details such as national insurance numbers can be used to commit benefit fraud, set up false bank accounts and obtain official documents such as passports.
More than 200 civil servants in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) have been disciplined for surfing the Web for porn during office hours. In the last eight months the staff accessed over two million pornographic images, including 18,000 involving child abuse. The Sun newspaper reports that some of the sites touted images purported to be of kids as young as 13.
Teacher arrested over child porn
And in a different case,
Teacher arrested over child pictures
And in a different case,
Royal News Princess Eugenies Teacher Arrested On Porn Charges
And in a different case,
Ex-teacher charged with sexual encounter with pupil
And in a different case,
College rocked by new sex scandal
I give up–there’s a lot more out there.
August 28th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
A little unfair, I think.
These information sharing initiatives are usually there for a legitimate purpose, but there is always a degree of risk around who gets access. In my view most of those (high 90%s) who get to see the info will have a legitimate reason and behave responsibly. There is a small number who will get sloppy, and an even smaller number who will deliberately abuse the system. It’s important that there are disciplinary and, when necessary, legal sanctions against those who do so ….. taken in all of the cases you’ve highlighted.
It’s also important that you balance the risk of misuse/abuse against the intended benefits, which is always a value judgement. You can take the absolutist view, common in the privacy lobby, that there is something suspicious or dangerous about all information sharing initiatives – a view that is always amplified around children and vulnerable people – but that entails doing nothing, and living with the failings that lead to events like the Victoria Climbie case.
Let’s be honest with ourselves that there’s an element of risk in any course of action, and decide what is the acceptable level. The challenge is to assess this calmly and measure it against what can be achieved by such initiatives.
August 28th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
The headline is from The Times in the UK but the concerns apply everywhere that a ‘database’ is seen as solution to a communication problem.
ContactPoint was set up after the official report into the death of Victoria Climbié. Lord Laming concluded that the eight-year-old’s murder could have been prevented had there been better communication between professionals.
Communication is not the same as broadcasting or publication. There is a sense of checks and balances between the participants in a communication. This is rarely apparent in stores of data offered to people on the basis of the role they undertake.
As Tom Fuller points out persons having a particular role are not necessarily to be trusted with the information. There will be inevitable bad eggs present in teaching; medical; legal; social work professions; and the police. Also leakage of information which should be private to the individual can occur from simple careless behaviour of otherwise trustworthy individuals. Sadly, assigning information access rights to a role (for example, head-teacher), does not prevent individual head-teachers delegating that responsibility to a temporary secretary which is probably not how the legislators or system designers saw the ‘database’ being acceptable.[http://davethinkingaloud.blogspot.com/2007/08/safety-fears-over-new-register-of-all.html]