UK's data watchdog probes use of private email to discuss government business at the Department of Health The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has opened an official inquiry into the misuse of private email accounts at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The investigation comes amid mounting allegations that senior officials within the department – including former health secretary Matt Hancock who …
That would certainly be consistent with the British Airways line in https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/06/british_airways_lawsuit_settled/ where they settled for over £30million without admitting liability.
In fact government ministers and others have often been found to have acted unlawfully and not faced any penalties.
Even incompetence doesn't seem to matter. Dido Harding (far too many articles on 'Test and Trace' to provide references) had the support of the PM and is considering applying for the top job at the NHS. Paula Vennells of the Post Office 'Project Horizon' catastrophe doesn't seem to have been held to account for all those innocent people prosecuted for false accounting, fraud etc. So I doubt that Matt Hancock has much to worry about from the ICO.
I do hope that the ICO does prosecute if there is evidence, but, lets face it, when the man who would have allowed the directors of Matrix Churchill to go to prison for selling arms to Iraq when they had been asked to by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 in "James Bond' parlance) can be made a life peer and provost of Eton College, it seems unlikely there will be any serious consequences. (William Waldegrave, if you didn't know. He and his colleagues decided to 're-interpret' the rules banning export of arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq to allow sale ofarms to Iraq, and not tell parliament as 'the rules had not changed, only the interpretation'.)
they can only prosecute under FOI if there is evidence of information being destroyed to avoid disclosure which is hard to prove.
Anything else is a decision notice. Even then the Govt will just use the Ministerial Veto within FOI that means they dont have to provide the information regardless.
'In a series of tweets, she said: "Nothing could be more serious than government ministers facing investigation for potentially breaking the law.'
We have a prime minister who, according to Private Eye (1550, 8/07/21) is apparently on record (c. 1990) agreeing to facilitate an assault on a journalist who had (supposedly) annoyed a businessman friend.
Err, what's with the "may".
Any use of private emails (or Whatsapp, or any other non-official communication channel) will reduce transparency and confidence. OK, the user may carefully copy every mail to an official account so that there's a record of it - but because that's a manual process you cannot know for certain that every email was included, and you can't know that the emails weren't edited while forwarded, and the headers will be lost (unless you forward as attachment).
As to the "someone contacted me on my personal account - it wasn't my fault" defence - well that's bogus. You simply forward the message to your official account and reply from there - making it very clear that only your official account is to be used for business. Not hard, unless you are totally IT illiterate ... oh, I see the problem now !
For a government that seems to operate on the basis of corrupt deals and casual incompetence, it is easy to see the attraction of off-the-record communications, both for avoiding accountability now, and for the impossibility of having the full extent of the awfulness ever exposed in the future.
I doubt that last part will work though, as we appear to be living through a time whose chapter in the history ebooks of the future will simply contain the words "what the hell were we thinking?" in 40 point bold.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
