26 Jan 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The Information Commissioner was pressed at the Leveson Inquiry today over whether or not he should seek out evidence of data protection breaches.
Christopher Graham said he had seen no proof of breaches of data protection beyond the “historic” evidence resulting from Operation Motorman published in 2006, which disclosed the names of 22 newspapers that used private investigator Steve Whittamore to access illegally-obtained information.
Graham said there is currently “no smoke”, and that it was not in his remit to “set off on fishing expeditions.”
“I am inclined to wait until I have more evidence of current abuse than I do at the moment,” he said, adding that the regulator had to “pick its battles” and “prioritise resources” where there is evidence of wrongdoing.
Lord Justice Leveson said that the absence of evidence does not mean something is or is not going on. “We do not know what we do not know,” he told Graham.
Graham added he was “surprised” to hear the Daily Express’ revelation earlier this month that they had used private investigator Steve Whittamore in 2010, five years after he had been convicted for illegally trading information.
He was also quizzed over a letter published today by the Hacked Off campaign asking the ICO to inform Whittamore’s targets, so they may challenge claims that searches were done in the public interest.
Graham said it would be a “phenomenal undertaking” to notify the targets revealed by Operation Motorman (the investigation that examined the use of a private investigators by the media to obtain personal information), adding that he “would have to take on a veritable army” of people to do so.
He later invited those concerned to make “subject access requests”.
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09 Dec 11 | Leveson Inquiry
The former Information Commissioner has denied that there was a policy of not investigating journalists during Operation Motorman.
Testifying at the Leveson Inquiry, Richard Thomas CBE said “there was no policy from the outset that we were not going to go against the press.”
He added he did not want to “let the press off the hook” but was advised by the ICO’s legal team that the financial aspect of prosecuting journalists over the use of private investigators to obtain personal data was too great.
The ICO’s counsel’s written advice, shown to the Inquiry on Monday, stated that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute journalists. Yet both he and the Office’s in-house lawyer told Thomas that journalists confronted would be well-briefed and well-armed, “like a barrel of monkeys”.
Thomas also denied any recollection of Motorman’s lead investigator Alec Owens suggesting journalists should be investigated, or of former deputy Francis Aldhouse saying the press were “too big” to take on.
On Monday Aldhouse himself denied saying this, negating Owens’s testimony.
Thomas said he was not involved in any discussion of investigating journalists, adding he was unaware of any decision that anyone “actively considering” prosecuting journalists.
His focus, he said, was the prosecution of private investigators, who he called “the middlemen who were organising the illegal trade”.
After a series of grilling questions from Robert Jay QC, counsel to the Inquiry, Thomas said he took full responsibility for everything that happened, while adding that it was hard to have details of what takes place in a large organisation.
He repeated that he was pleased no journalists were prosecuted, noting that would be “very demanding indeed” on the ICO. Journalists confronted would have “gone straight to Strasbourg”, he said, had they raised issues of freedom of expression.
Thomas told the Inquiry that “prosecution is not the only way to deal with a particular problem”, adding that the 2004 prosecution of private investigator Steve Whittamore produced a “perverse outcome” in his conditional discharge.
In a letter to the former chairman of the PCC, Christopher Meyer, Thomas had also written that the body could provide “more satisfactory outcomes than legal proceedings” in taking on the issue.
Discussing the outcomes of Motorman and its findings, Thomas said he could not categorically say all the journalists identified had committed offences. “They were driving the market,” he said.
When pressed by Jay, Thomas admitted that he could not think of a public interest defence for obtaining the contact numbers of friends or family through a private investigator. He added it would indicate a breach of section 55 of the Data Protection Act “at some stage”.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
05 Dec 11 | Leveson Inquiry
The former Deputy Information Commissioner told the Leveson Inquiry today that he did not recollect telling an investigator in Operation Motorman that the press were too big to take on.
Francis Aldhouse said this was not his view and he did “not fear the media”.
In his testimony to the Inquiry last week, former investigator Alec Owens claimed that, when he had alerted Aldhouse to the documents seized from private investigator Steve Whittamore’s home that revealed the extent of the press using private investigators, Aldhouse had told him the press were too big for the ICO to take on.
Aldhouse refuted the claims, telling the Inquiry that he did not recollect the meeting Owens, or hold the view that the media were too powerful. He said he had been happy to negotiate with the press in the past.
He added that he believed there had been a case for involving newspapers and journalists further in the Operation. He said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” to have apparently not been
consulted by his colleagues on the involvement of journalists.
He said had he been asked at the time, his view would have been that “we really ought to find a way to pursue this.”
Pressed by the Inquiry, Aldhouse said he did not recall any discussions regarding the way forward of the Operation, which he deemed one of the ICO’s “largest”. He said decisions made not to prosecute the press were done so by the Information Commissioner himself, adding that discussions he had with him were only “casual”.
The Inquiry was also shown potentially damning evidence given to the ICO by a senior lawyer in 2003. The counsel’s advice read that “many if not all of the journalists involved have committed offences”, and went on to say that the “overwhelming inference is that several editors must have been well aware of what their staff were up to and therefore party to it.”
The counsel’s advice also prioritised enforcement over the prosecution of journalists, to give a chance for the Press Complaints Commission to “put its house in order”.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson.
05 Nov 10 | News and features, United Kingdom
Google and the Information Commissioner’s Office have displayed contempt for privacy — and free speech will suffer as a result, says Alex Deane of Big Brother Watch
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