Archive for the ‘Freedom of Information’ Category

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Who owns patient records?

Friday, March 4th, 2011

The proposed Heath and Social Care bill has certainly got temperatures raised at the British Medical Association, not least because the organisation claims that the new legislation could threaten the confidentiality of patient medical records.

As the BMA point out, the bill would give bodies including the Commissioning Board, the NHS Information Centre, and the Secretary of State broader powers to access confidential information, but provides little guidance on how this power could be wielded, who could potentially have access to the records in the future, or how it will be safeguarded.

The BMA’s main concern seems to be that patients may withhold information from doctors if they become concerned for their privacy. Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA’s head of science and ethics, recently said that the government had placed its desire for access to information over the need to respect patient confidentiality, adding:

There is very little reference to rules on patient confidentiality that would ensure patients are asked before their information is shared or guarantee that the patient’s identity will not be revealed. Fears that their data may be shared with others may result in patients withholding important information; this may not only affect their own health but has implications for the wider health service.

There has never been a level playing field when it comes to accessing medical records and data. Back in 2006 Dr Foster Intelligence was given exclusive access to NHS data in an agreement with the DoH – and it seems any big pharmaceutical companies with deep enough pockets can lay their hands on this supposedly sacred information (see this blog post on Dr Foster by journalist Robert Munro).

The BMA has voiced support for the use of anonymised data for “secondary health purposes” but maintains that identifiable information should not be disclosed unless patients give explicit consent. The Department of Health has said that the bill does not change any of the existing legal safeguards, “which are set out in the Data Protection Act and the common law of confidence.”

You can track the progress of the Bill on the British Medical Association website.

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Posted in Freedom of Information, Politics | No Comments »

Anonymity and the Arms Trade

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

The UK’s role in selling arms to the Middle East is again in the spotlight. This excerpt from ‘The Silent State’ published this week in Open Rights Group’s online magazine goes into some of the reasons why having a public debate in Britain about our arms industry is nearly impossible due to a chronic lack of information.

While the state likes to keep all private citizens under surveillance, getting a staff directory of public officials is still all but impossible. The excerpt below from Chapter 4 of the book, tells the story of one reporter’s battle – the Guardian’s Rob Evans – for the staff directory of the department charged with granting arms export licenses.

Anonymity & the arms trade
Rob Evans wanted the staff directory of the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO), a hived-off part of the Ministry of Defence, which spends taxpayer money helping UK arms companies (predominantly BAE Systems) win contracts for the export of armaments. He wanted it for several reasons.

‘We were hearing a lot of allegations about corruption within DESO in relation to the arms industry,’ Rob told me. ‘The problem was you had to find out if the employee alleged to be accepting bribes from an arms company actually worked for DESO. There was no way to tell. In the absence of a staff directory we had to resort to, well, subterfuge. It was done in the public interest but in my view that’s wrong. Why should we have had to resort to subterfuge? All public officials should be named.’

The Data Protection Act is often used in the most ludicrous ways: reporters’ bylines blacked out and ministers’ names censored. If you’re a public official then suddenly your privacy rights are sacrosanct. DESO and the Ministry of Defence were none too keen to provide Rob with a copy of the directory, so from his desk at Guardian newspapers he filed a freedom-of-information request in January 2005.

The directory lists staff names, job titles, work addresses, work telephone numbers and email addresses. In February he received a ‘redacted’ or, in plain English, censored version. And when I say censored I mean heavily. You’ve likely seen the ‘redacted’ MPs’ expenses, but imagine something even more gratuitous. What Rob received was a staff directory with all the names of staff together with all their contact details removed. Even the main switchboard number was blacked out! Only titles remained and for staff based in Saudi Arabia even these were excised. As a staff directory it was pretty much useless, particularly if your purpose was to track staff movement through the revolving door that exists between DESO and the arms industry and vice versa.

(more…)

Posted in Freedom of Information, Silent State | 3 Comments »

Council survey causes privacy concern

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

A survey issued by Wiltshire Council has stirred up a privacy debate in the local community, as it asks questions about resident’s sexuality, debt levels and qualifications.

According to the Salisbury Journal, the document has been sent out to 26,500 households across the county “to help the council develop its housing and planning policy” to provide affordable housing in the area.

The council said responses will be anonymous, but campaign group Privacy International has advised people not to fill out the form at all. PI’s Alexander Hanff told the BBC:

Questions about sexual orientation [and] how much money you have in the bank are highly personal questions…They’re asking for far too much data with far too much variants and this is an issue, and a         concern, from a privacy perspective.

Oddly, the council’s service director for economy and enterprise said, “all this stuff is actually getting cleansed before we get the data”.
Data cleansing usually involves verifying collected information and discarding any data that is out of date, but it’s unclear what is being done to the surveys. The council also claims they are required by law to ask about sexual orientation, but what law this is they don’t say.

The council expects 6,000 completed surveys, so it will be interesting to see how many are submitted after the concerns raised.

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Posted in Freedom of Information | 2 Comments »

A World of Wikileaks

Friday, December 10th, 2010

The global publicity resulting from the publication of the US diplomatic cables in the Guardian, New York Times, Wikileaks and other newspapers during the past two weeks has focused attention on the power of leaking.

Now several new operations are joining the fray by offering wikileaks-type portals.

Yesterday, Brussels Leaks was set up by anonymous founders, who cited WikiLeaks as its inspiration. The site welcomes tips-offs, files, and other disclosures about issues of social, environmental or political importance in Europe.

They say:

Having worked in Brussels for a long while now in various capacities we know (as anyone who works in political fields in Brussels for a short space of time) that plenty of big decisions are made on the basis of individual whims, be it whims shaped through connections to lobby groups, consultants or NGOs. Not all are bad, of course, but we’ve heard about a lot of decisions made based on questionable sources of information…There are plenty of good people in powerful positions who too often see shocking information pass them by. How do we know this? We’ve been there.

Another site that has been in the works for some time is Openleaks which is spearheaded by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who split from WikiLeaks in September after clashing with founder Julian Assange. I interviewed Daniel in September for my book and he outlined to me this new site which would de-centralise the publication of leaks.

Openleaks will allow leakers to anonymously submit information to a secure online drop box. The site won’t publish the information itself but will allow leakers to specify their preferred publication outlets whether that be through the media, trade union or an NGO. This is a good plan as it is through the centralised publication and the identifiable figurehead of Julian Assange that Wikileaks is most vulnerable.

Russian political activist and blogger Alexei Navalny, has set up his own whistleblowing site. Interestingly, Assange was dismissive of Chinese activists who hoped to set up a WikiLeaks type project in that country. He told Forbes magazine:

It’s not something that’s easy to do right…We encouraged them to come to us to work with us. It would be nice to have more Chinese speakers working with us in a dedicated way. But what they’d set up had no meaningful security. They have no reputation you can trust. It’s very easy and very dangerous to do it wrong.

If you know of any other Wikileaks inspired sites then do let me know.

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Posted in Freedom of Information | 1 Comment »

Article: The Revolution will be Digitised

Friday, December 10th, 2010

WikiLeaks: The revolution has begun – and it will be digitised
Guardian, 29 November 2010
By Heather Brooke

The web is changing the way in which people relate to power, and politics will have no choice but to adapt too.

Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.

Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn’t sharing information that had put the nation’s security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous “lost opportunities” to stop the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the commission ordered a restructuring of government and intelligence services to better mimic the web itself. Collaboration and information-sharing was the new ethos. But while millions of government officials and contractors had access to Siprnet, the public did not.

But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.

(more…)

Posted in Articles, Freedom of Information | 1 Comment »

WikiLeaks cables

Friday, December 10th, 2010

There’s been a distinct lack of posts on the blog by me. Turns out I have a good excuse. I’ve been busily working through the US diplomatic cables for the past few months and the fruits of that labour began appearing last week in The Guardian newspaper.

I’ll be posting a few of my directly authored pieces but in the meantime here is a podcast I did with Jonathan Powell, former chief of staff to Tony Blair. I’d just raced through the snow to get to the Guardian so my usual fast delivery is at warp speed. Have to remember to breathe…slow down.

Politics Weekly: Secrets and leaks

Jonathan Powell and I discuss WikiLeaks and how governments keep secrets in a digital age on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast.

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Posted in Freedom of Information, Politics | No Comments »

Mozilla bringing back online privacy?

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

The makers of popular internet browser Firefox are attempting to implement a ‘do-not-track’ mechanism to prevent users being monitored online.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Mozilla had previously ‘killed’ a powerful new tool to limit online tracking after coming under pressure from the advertising industry. Mozilla claims the tool was scrapped out of concern advertisers would be forced to adopt ‘sneakier techniques’ and could slow down some websites.

Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, told WSJ: “I wouldn’t say we are under pressure from advertisers. They are a big part of the economics of the Web. We want to understand what their needs are.”

The needs of advertisers are definitely well-understood by Mozilla, as their most recent financial statements reveal about $86 million of its $104 million in 2009 revenue came from an advertising agreement with Google.

Both Google and Microsoft are said to be awaiting details of a do-not-track proposal before they take a position. Apple has declined to comment on the matter. If the majority of commercial browsers refuse to make progress with online privacy then Mozilla’s announcement is more a toe-in-the-water than a step forward.

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Posted in Freedom of Information | No Comments »

Public call for stronger data protection

Friday, November 26th, 2010

UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has handed out the first fines for breaches of the Data Protection Act saying they will “send a strong message” to those handling data.

The commissioner was given the ability to fine organisations up to £500,000 for breaching the Act earlier this year. Hertfordshire County Council was fined £100,000 for sending two faxes regarding a child sex abuse case to the wrong recipient. Sheffield-based company A4e was fined £60,000 after a computer containing the unencrypted data of 24,000 people was lost. Both incidents occurred in June.

In these cases, both organisations came forward of their own accord. In some American states such as California, revealing breaches such as this is mandatory The system in the UK is currently voluntary although a recent poll published by LogRhythm showed that 80 percent of people wanted more stringent laws regarding data breaches.

Out of the 5000 people surveyed, 31 percent even suggested that company directors should be subject to criminal proceedings. Many have welcomed the commissioner’s step towards protecting sensitive data. The Financial Times referred to Graham as a “privacy watchdog chief with a bite”, and noted that the announcement follows criticism of the ICO’s handing of the Google Street View data collection controversy.

Perhaps the ICO is trying to prove it is a watchdog with teeth.

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Posted in Freedom of Information, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Facebook rival Diaspora goes live

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

A “privacy aware” social network called Diaspora went live on Wednesday. It was founded earlier this year by four students from New York University who saw an opportunity for a new type of service to counter Facebook which has increasingly come under attack for its dubious privacy policy.

One of Diaspora’s founders, Maxwell Salzberg told the BBC: “We are going after the idea there are all these centralised services where people are giving up their personal information. We want to put users back in control of what they share.”

It’s refreshing to see a social network that doesn’t require individuals to hand over reams of private data but with Facebook’s 500 million members, is there a place for Diaspora? Although the company plans to roll out services gradually, subscription to the site is only available to a small number of invited users.

Salzberg says Diaspora, “is not just about Facebook. Facebook is not what we are going after.” But the founders will have to progress past the “baby steps” they outline in a blog post on the site if they want their privacy-championing project to challenge the status quo.

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Posted in Freedom of Information, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Taking action on privacy breaches

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

My new assistant Natalie Peck will be contributing to this blog in future. Here is her first post. Welcome to the blog Natalie!
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This week, Britain’s information commissioner Christopher Graham announced he will finally start fining websites that breach people’s privacy.

Graham’s plans to “set the benchmark” for online data protection coincide with proposed regulations by the European Union for more stringent privacy measures, ensuring companies provide users with updates on how, why, by whom, and for how long their data is used.

Companies must also alert users to how then can delete all the information held on them if they decide to stop using a service. For example Facebook still holds photos, wall posts and other data long after an individual account has been deactivated.

Google has also been at the centre of the privacy debate, with recent revelations that the company collected wifi data during the controversial Streetview mapping of the UK. The company was recently accused of a “staggering” invasion of privacy by Conservative MP Mark Lancaster.

It’s one thing for the public’s privacy to be invaded but entirely another when that breach concerns a Member of Parliament. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) has sprung into action after MPs’ personal details were accidentally put at risk on the expenses database. The data included bank details, number plates and home phone numbers. The system’s admin account will now be regularly reviewed and implement further security measures.

Posted in Freedom of Information | No Comments »

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