The British IPCO (Office of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner) has released a report detailing MI5’s unlawful storing and accessing of data that it has collected. Although MI5 is allowed to collect data under warrants issued by the Home Secretary, there are laws in place to protect personal information that MI5 has not been adhering to. Most notably, the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act. This legislation stipulates guidelines that limit the sharing of data, as well as when to destroy data that is not needed anymore.
In 2016, an MI5 lawyer raised concerns over the agencies ability to meet the standards set out by the new Act, and this latest report only highlights these concerns have not been addressed. The investigation found that MI5 has no review, retention, or deletion policy for the data it has collected. There were also many inconsistencies found in the transferring of data to different areas of the agency. The report concluded that MI5 is capable of mitigating these issues by implementing the safeguards set in the Investigatory Powers Act. It also recommended an investigation at a later time to ensure that these changes take place.
Anyone who is concerned with privacy should be alarmed and upset by this data handling failure of MI5. But what really upsets me, is the bad light this story puts on data analytics. Data collection and analytics is so important in understanding so many things about our world and it is a shame when a group or institution doesn’t take privacy seriously enough. Ethical data collection ensures that personal data is kept safe and can not be used in nefarious ways. This personal data belongs to real people and it’s misuse can lead to real world consequences. This also leads to a lack of faith in the data collection process and will only hinder data analytic projects in the future. I hope MI5 learns from it’s mistakes, and that anyone else concerned with improving ethical data collection learns from their example
Source: MI5 slammed by watchdog for failing to delete intercepted phone and internet data, by Bill Goodwin. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252479661/MI5-slammed-by-watchdog-for-failing-to-delete-intercepted-phone-and-internet-data
LIS 4022 Spring 2020 