A day for quiet reflection

Yesterday was European Data Protection Day; this blog held a one day's silence as a gesture of respect to the millions of pieces of personal and sensitive data that have been lost in the last year.

Across the continent people gathered in their hundreds of thousands, coming together in their workplaces, in their communities, in the fields, in the hills and in the streets, to mark this most solemn and momentous day of data.

I need not tell you what an emotional day it was for us all.

Some of us may have brushed aside manly tears as we reflected on the 182 per cent rise in card cloning and phishing in the second quarter of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007; others may have stifled their sobs over the $2.8bn cost of phishing attacks; still more wept -openly and without shame - for the 44 per cent of small businesses that have fallen victims to identity fraud through phishing, internet scams and data theft.

But all were united in their fervent hope that 2009 finally marks the year when the UK's government pulls its bloody finger out and puts a stop to departments' haemorrhaging of our personal and sensitive data.

Fat chance...

A load of nonce-sense

If the first law of marketing is that sex sells, the first rule of tabloid journalism is that paedos shift papers.

Things may have quietened down a bit since the 2000 moral panic, when the News of the World whipped up a hysterical mob of mouth-breathing simpletons into an orgy of vigilante violence, but tabloid editors still know that their barely-literate readers love a good “hate” almost as much as a new Lizzy Duke sovereign ring.

So it’s no surprise to see yet another paedo story in today’s Sun, with the baffling headline: “Internet pervert charges rap”. In a nutshell, the story concerns comments made by the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre which "slammed" (criticised) Internet Services Providers (ISPs) for charging child abuse investigators to access their data.

The way that the Sun spins it, cynical ISPs are making an easy profit from the authorities hunting down Britain's biggest nonces. Naturally, the Sun is sympathetic to CEOP’s chief executive, Jim Gamble, who believes that ISPs should waive these charges in the public interest.

Balance has never been the Sun’s strongest suit. If it were, they would have pointed out that under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) ISPs are entitled to charge the police for reasonable costs for data retrieval and that in the last four years, the Government has paid ISPs and telcos £19m for its agencies’ growing demands for access to communications data. This information was obviously deemed by the Sun to be of no interest to its audience, even to its more intellectual readers who don’t need to use their index fingers to read a newspaper.

Interestingly, CEOP’s share of this £19m amounts to around £170,000 – less than one per cent of the total paid to ISPs. With CEOP having made just shy of 10,000 requests, the average cost of each request works out at less than £18.

Why, then, is the Sun focused purely on paedophile investigators, when all regular police forces and government agencies are charged, fairly and under UK law, for using ISPs’ time and resources?

As Malcolm Hutty, policy chief at the London Internet Exchange (Linx) points out, "Regular police forces investigate extremely serious crimes using communications data, including murder, rape and kidnapping, and they believe they are better served by cost recovery. We don't believe that the situation becomes different for child abuse cases merely because they are investigated by a specialist national unit."

But here we come to the second law of tabloid journalism: never let the facts get in the way of a good story.