After the Brighton bomb which exploded at the Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party conference in autumn 1984, the authorities took security at political party conferences more seriously โ searching of venues beforehand, access passes for those attending, checks on hotel workers. In those earliest days of laws around data, what legal basis did the police have for making, and holding, data on people who werenโt guilty of a crime? A file at the National Archives shows that the instinct of the Home Office was to avoid publicity about it.
The Liberal Party was holding its annual assembly at Harrogate in September 1987. A Police National Computer (PNC) terminal was installed in the Yorkshire spa townโs borough council basement control room. The head of the PNC unit described it as โessential to provide on-site presenceโ. That shows how few computers were then. Likewise Lancashire Police ahead of the 1987 Conservative Party conference at Blackpool in April 1987 were proposing to use initially a computer with 6MB of memory and two, 112MB disc drives. A โfully configuredโ computer would hold about 40,000 records. By 21st century standards, such size memory is laughably small. File HO 521/88 records that a chief superintendent in charge of the computers wrote โfrom our experience in 1985 this should prove an adequately sized machineโ. If needed, police would install a second computer and if they still could not cope, they would ask for help from the PNC.
‘Limited possibilities’
HM Chief Inspectorate of Cosntabulary Sir Lawrence Byford had led a review of security after the Brighton bomb. In April 1986 he wrote that โI do not believe it is safe for us to lower our guard by refusing to make facilities available for the chief constable of Dorsetโ โ in other words, the police force in charge of securing the upcoming Conservative Party conference at Bournemouth. โWhilst the widespread vetting as distinct from the selective vetting of employees offers extremely limited possibilities for the identification of people engaged in preparation for an attack on the conference the fact that such checking is being carried out has an extremely useful deterrent value โฆ. one of the few options which the security forces have in this connection is that the opposition are uncertain about the extent of defensive measures and the depth to which they are carried out. The fact that people staying in and on the staff of hotels in conference towns are being subjected to computer screening will inevitably become known and must be a factor operating on the minds of those who are disposed to mount some terrorist action.โ
‘1984 type facility’
The head of the PNC unit in February 1985 raised a concern that by using the PNC to investigate ahead of a Conservative conference in Newcastle the next month, โwe were providing a 1984 type facilityโ. That was a reference to George Orwellโs novel 1984, which naturally in the year it was set had provoked renewed debate; and the PNC was pointing out whether it ought to look into something not criminal. For that Newcastle conference, two visual display units (VDUs) were linked to the PNC in an incident room opened by the police for the event; and names and vehicle numbers of all guests staying at the main Newcastle hotels during the eight weeks before the two-day conference would be checked against PNC records. An assistant to Byford noted that guests would be recorded in the (Northumbria) forceโs own computer and, it was implied, would be passed to other forces, to check against vehicle registers. The assistant warned that it seemed โto break some entirely new ground and if as is almost inevitable details of the police operation become public, it seems equally inevitable that Parliamentary questions and some public debate about civil liberties and perhaps about data protection will follow.โ If inevitable, the assistant went on, better to โtake the initiativeโ and issue an early press release rather than โfight a defensive battle once it has been scooped by the news mediaโ. A Home Office official noted the most sensitive point (not addressed in the file) was how long would the guestsโ records be kept.
In July 1985, when Lancashire Police were asking to exchange classified data between Blackpool and the PNC (at Hendon in north London) during the 1985 Conservative conference, using an encryption device, the PNC unit noted that the proposed device used a publicly available algorithm, and was not recommended by CESG (the UK official technical authority on information assurance, now part of the NCSC).
Capacity problem
In May 1985, while Lancashire Police were building their own intelligence database, ahead of the Conservative conference, data was mostly of those using or employed in hotels โ as the Home Office file HO 521/88 recorded, innocent people doing about their ordinary business; such data collection could be controversial, according to a Home Office paper of the time. The paper also raised a practical problem, that the PNC was โheavily loadedโ and Lancashire wanted to check their own database and the database arising from the Brighton bomb at the same time, to see for any common factors. Parliament had passed a first, 1984, Data Protection Act, which was due to come into force in autumn 1985 (in other words, potentially embarrassingly, around the conference time; meanwhile, for the March 1985 Newcastle conference, nothing in law prohibited police from recording names and number plates, yet nor did any โspecific legal powerโ allow police to do it). The Home Office felt it had little alternative but to go ahead with the facilities; but to prepare in case it became public; and hoped โto get away without publicity at all if we say nothingโ. The Home Office official did not refer it to the Home Secretary โat this stageโ. The PNC already had a โcapacityโ problem, meeting needs of police in major incidents (such as large murder inquiries such as for the โYorkshire Ripperโ).
