Minister tells the House of Lords it'll be another 12 weeks before UK's deleted criminal records can be restored Data lost because of a scripting error introduced to the UK's Police National Computer (PNC) in November will take another 12 weeks to recover, according to a statement in Parliament. Problems with the code did not come to light until 10 January, when the Home Office became aware of the loss – 413,000 deleted records of …
I seem to remember that, years ago, their defence as to why they couldn't remove things - such as records of arrests where people were then "unarrested" because they'd clearly got the wrong person, and the fingerprints taken at the time - was because it was too difficult and would affect other PNC records.
Turns out that wasn't for technical reasons, but for those of the competence of the team responsible for doing it. Who would ever have guessed?
(Where's the world-weary cynicism icon when you need it?)
As I recall, the Police computer records were known to be in breach of the then Data Protection Act, but were kept while parliament decided to change the law so that police records on people innocent of any crime but who had come to the attention of the police (such as victims, witnesses, members of victims' or witnesses families, people 'Driving While Black' etc.) could be kept for eternity (three years now) because, umm, the Police are 'above the law' in some respects. Oh and they had never envisioned a society in which they could not keep all the records they had obtained.
But then I'm old and my memory is not so good as it used to be.
It wasn't me, I tell you! I've never even heard of Number 23a Acacia Gardens.
And as for 'Arms to Iran' That rings no bells with me, I had a dodgy bladder that day and was probably in the 'John', or the Woking branch of Pizza Express.
;o)
Can we have full model names and specs of the machines used to run scripts that go wrong on all systems in future? I bet there is some right old tot being run on Dell boxes right now. I personally ran a whole heap of crap on a HP box HP-UX 11.11 before I got found out.
If the data was (were?) being deleted for legal reasons, and they have a way of undeleting, then how could the (mistaken) deletion have complied with the legal requirement? Are *any* of their deletions in fact permanent? Or perhaps they have a shadow IT system, and the only thing taking five months is making sure they don't undelete too many records and give away the show.
Edit: I see low_resolution_foxxes already made the same point, but more succinctly.
... is that the data predates wide spread rollout of relational databases. Its not just a case of restoring the rows to the tables. This is a hierarchical data store which uses record offsets to link to the next record in the set. What this means in practice is that once the erroneous delete happened there are only two ways back:
1) Stop the database and recover from backup. But that would wipe out any active ongoing investigations.
2) Restore the backup to a spare machine, run some scripts to compare the restored backup to production to see whats missing, and then manually re-enter the missing data by hand. The fun part is (re)establishing the links to all the 3rd party agencies that connect to the PNC.
Well, I suppose (2) could be improved by writing a program. But then you would want to test that VERY carefully, sort of like, much more carefully than the original script was tested!
I Am Spartacus: "1) Stop the database and recover from backup. But that would wipe out any active ongoing investigations."
That depends on whether they had journaling enabled and backed up the journals as well as the database. Journaling has been around literally for decades, we had it in the ICL Data Dictionary System in the 1980's.
Of course that would assume the database was professionally run in the first place...
"This is a hierarchical data store which uses record offsets to link to the next record in the set."
No it isn't, it's Adabas. Adabas is ... different
The hierarchical database sounds more like a CODASYL-compliant system. Ahhh, DMS-1100. Those were the days.
Adabas isn't relational, or hierarchical, it's ... different
I think I'm remembering 'inverted list storage', but it was decades ago and a different Police force
Oh yeah - they built the Horizon system at the Post Office. And that went really well didn't it? The judge in the Bates vs Post Office trial said he had "grave concerns" about the "veracity of evidence given by Fujitsu employees to other courts in previous proceedings about the known existence of bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system".
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