Government to protect children from zombie paedophiles

The Vetting database will protect children not only from living predators – but from dead ones too. That is the startling conclusion from an official response given this week by Meg Hillier MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Office, when asked whether there are any procedures "to remove information about an …

[Anonymous Coward]

no removal policy - no surprise

As there is no real policy beyond 'gather gather gather' then we will be data rich and there will be no crime anymore.

[Dan 7]

Bu dum dum tish !!

So would a Zombie paedophile not call out "Brains !!!" but instead call out "Bairns !!!" ;)

[Benny]

@Dan 7

Face, meet palm.

[The Indomitable Gall]

Don't be so hasty....

I can imagine those crafty genius paedos faking their own deaths if it would let them back into our schools....

[Nigel 11]

Not actually silly

If you accept that such vetting is needed at all, it makes sense not to remove the allegedly deceased in a hurry. If you were a convicted pervert wanting to escape from vetting, one way would be to fake your own death. (It almost worked for "canoe man", and did work for quite a lot of Nazi war criminals).

Records for people "reported deceased" are a lot less bothersome from a privacy perspective, than records for the people who are still alive. Data storage is cheap. Keep the "reported deceased" records hanging around until the person's age would be (say) 150, and then auto-remove them on the basis that no-one lives that long.

[Anonymous Coward]

James May, likely kiddy diddler

It seems to me that James May went into a school for a TV program and interacted with children, plus he is a TV presenter.

Researching the issue, the search

[pedophile ordinary bloke] returns only 5070 hits,

whereas the search

[pedophile tv presenter] returns 19900, NEARLY 4 TIMES AS MANY.

Thus there is a strong correlation there, and Alan Johnson PUT OUR CHILDREN AT RISK BY LETTING THIS HIGHLY PROBABLY KIDDY DIDDLER play with our children!

My science will NOT BE DENIED!

Yours faithfully,

Jacquy Smith

[Fred 1]

Zombie teachers

The dead may walk - but they can't work in teaching

It's all changed since my day then.

At least there are still plenty of jobs for them in politics.

[kevin biswas]

Well, I for one...

...welcome our new zombie pedophile overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

This is deliberate policy

The records of deceased persons remain on the database. Over time, records of deceased persons come to dominate the database. The statistics for offences committed by those on the database, per person registered, therefore decreases over time. The decreasing offence rate (among those registered) is then trumpeted to the Press to show that the database stops people offending.

[irish donkey]

Maybe Zombies are the next thing we need to be afriad off

I mean I've seen Shaun of the Dead. They were quite scary

Does the governemnt have a secret facility where they are breaing a super grem which will escape and infect all the peado's. You can laugh I seen a news report about it. All it took was 28 days and everybody was a pedo.

icon: Run they are coming Run Run

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm?

The DPA specifically applies to data on an "identifiable living individual" so there is nothing in the act about storing data on identifiable dead individuals. Not sure what it has to say about identifiable undead individuals, however they can be hard to identify once their skin starts falling off.

@Dan 7

I can see what you did there. Thanks.

[AlistairJ]

Wot no zombie icon?

Disgraceful. Skull and crossbones is the closest I could get

[Richard 39]

Who designed this database?

What idiot designed this database without a 'Delete' button

Oops, sorry I forgot our pig troughing overlords don't want to delete any data of any sort they can hold about us mere mortal citizens

[Scott 19]

As someone said above

1 bad man, 1 good man, 1 dead man on DB (to be PC they could be women). 33% bad men.

1 bad man, 1 good man 50% bad men, look sheep we've cut bad men by 17% gives us a pay raise.

[Decius]

Free bonus!

Dead people can still teach- It's only dead pedos that are forbidden by the new database of privacy protection.

[Anonymous Coward]

Suspected

Considering this database holds data which is not even proven in a court of law, is it any surprise that there is no process to deal with death. This is just a dirt database to hold over the British working man to keep him in line. Labour = utter scum/

[TeeCee]

I wonder.....

Ok, so they can't remove dead people from the database so we are protected from zombie peadophiles.

But, is it possible to add a dead person to the database? Are zombie peadophiles still a threat if they kept their noses clean* before joining the swelling ranks of the undead?

What about ISA staff who are obviously only dead from the neck upwards? How do they fit into the scheme of things zombie-wise?

*and still attached to their faces, obviously.

[Anonymous Coward]

Confused...

"an individual can remove themselves from the register at their own request."

If I'm reading this correctly a zombie paedophile can remove themselves from the register and threaten our children.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.

[John Smith 19]

probably will add dead teachers as well.

After alll it seems they cannot manage the whole process from addition to deletion properly why not.

I guess this whole data management process is trickier than ministers think.

Maybe they should hire some professionals.

Oh wait....

[Number6]

If it's OK for Harry Potter...

I seem to remember a dead teacher at Hogwarts (not counting Dumbledore).

[bexley]

@ian45

labour = scum

yes but really that should be expanded to

politicians = self serving scum

really, the reaction to the expenses reforms has pretty much tipped my opinion in favour of all of them being scum. Winging and complaining that they cant have a second home for free anymore.

excuse me but can anyone here testify to their employer giving them a free house (to keep and sell afterwards). who do these people think they are, this absurd sense of entitlement they all appear to have goes a long way to explaining some of the ridiculous policies that come out of arse of parliament.

A politicians job is to represent the peoples majority opinion in parliament. Getting rich in the process is not a right that they have. I say bin all their expenses and lower their wage. THat way al the bad eggs (most of them) will go back to big business and we'll get genuine, caring people in parliment who will do a proper job of representing the people.

How can anyone represent the people accurately when they think it is normal to have a moat around their house and expect others to maintain it for them?

Let's see how long it takes to sort out the public transport system when the politicians have to actually use it like the rest of us.

went a little off topic there, boo, down with the dead pedo's

[Ted Treen]

Confusion reigns...

But if a zombie paedo restricts himself/herself/itself to zombie kiddies, then:-

a) is a crime committed?

b) is that alright then?

But anyway, zombie paedos should be taken out & hung by the neck until alive (or whatever).

Not really disgusted - just think the gravestone's apposite!

[Marvin the Martian]

@AC 13h53

Fine piece of FUD, but it doesn't make sense. When is last time you saw a "new offenses per person in database" or similar?

The amount of offenses per pedophile will not go down due to deceased ones being there [except if you (groundlessly) believe the new generation is offending more; in such case the increase would be slowed, but still exist]. The amount of offenses committed/reported will stay the same, either way.

There may be a small use to keeping in the dead (crimes solved later can be attributed to a deceased person in the database; if the db tracks this). Deleting is just a loss of information which takes effort without a clear advantage, and may be done erroneously.

Much much better to just add a flag/ db field "deceased"; if error easy to switch.

[deadlockvictim]

Aren't zombies undead?

I seem to remember from AD&D that zombies are undead.

Hopefully those who've designed the database model remembered to make the LifeStatus field datatype as tinyint (or it's equivalent in whatever DB is being used) rather than as boolean [1] or integer [2]

[1] What would might expect from a fairly[3] boolean state like death.

[2] What I wouldn't be surprised to see after all.

[3] Miracle Max from 'The Princess Bride' has other opinions.

[John Savard]

What about voting?

As one common method of crafting a false identity is to use the information of a real person who is deceased, whether by crooked politicians having confederates use the names of voters who haven't been removed from the voter's list yet, or by spies obtaining the birth certificates of children who died in infancy, this could be a valid type of check to make, if it had been thought out in advance.

[Paul_Murphy]

Hold on, what about the other options?

Live pedos abusing (un)dead children,

(Un)dead pedos abusing living children,

(Un)dead pedos abusing (un)dead children,

An (un)dead pedo that gets themself removed from the database (therefore becoming a respectable child abuser??)

It's a nightmare! - my solution would be to kill a convicted pedo (hang, draw and quarter them 'just to be safe' ), then chop the remaining bits up into small sections for dogs to eat.

Then they can be removed from the database - before someone else with the same names come along.

roll on friday

[John Ozimek]

Dead in the Channel Isles

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but just in case.

I worked, many years back, on building a database with a large but slow IT department and budget limitations.

The db users decided they wanted various exclusions run...like "do-not-mail", living outside the UK, deceased...and our genius IT team came up with a large quote...which was OK...but also a very long development time...which was not.

At the time, we had just the one field for goneaway/deceased...so we improvised...

1 meant goneaway. 2 became do-not-mail. 3, from memory, was living in the Channel Isles. And 4 was deceased.

Meant all key info was preserved, and individuals could be deselected on the basis of numeric status alone.

Yeah, yeah...meant that being deceased and living in the Channel Isles were mixed up from time to time...but we took the view that both were bars to receiving further comms...so any flag with a value greater than or equal to 1 was fair game for exclusion.

[Wayland Sothcott 1]

Burn all who fail CRB

"It's a nightmare! - my solution would be to kill a convicted pedo (hang, draw and quarter them 'just to be safe' ), then chop the remaining bits up into small sections for dogs to eat.

Then they can be removed from the database - before someone else with the same names come along."

Paul Murphy.

No you need to burn the bodies of the zombies and the living alike if having submitted to the ISA database they fail. That would keep data searches nice and speedy and keep data entry for the staff very low. Plus it would be good for the environment to have all that CO2 returned to the atmosphere and save the planet by reducing the population.

I am sure I have the science right on this one.

[Anonymous Coward]

why purge the database

I mean it's really very simple. The more names you have; the more you can say (lie) that it's "doing it's job". The more names you have, the more you can play number games (lie) that it's "doing it's job".

These are dirty lowdown lying wankers who shouldn't be on ANY payroll anywhere and probably failed their own extended CRB so they've got to work for gubmint.