Four men supplied confidential Police National Computer data to national newspapers, a court heard in April. Mark Rowe writes.
Blackfriars Crown Court heard that a police control room worker, a retired police officer now a private detective, and two other private detectives, passed PNC information to the press 19 times. The control room worker and the ex-policeman each admitted one offence of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office. The two pirvate investigators admitted a breach of section 55 of the Data Protection Act. Each man got a two-year conditional discharge.
The court heard how information was fed to The Sunday Mirror, the Mail on Sunday, and the News of the World. One of the articles as a result was in the Sunday Mirror, about actress Jessie Wallace, who stars as Cat Slater in BBC soap EastEnders. Headline: ‘TV Cat’s Guilty Secrets – she hides criminal past from EastEnders’ bosses’.
As with so much to do with the mass media, no-one in the media is in the least keen to report on how the media goes about its business. Court cases like these are only the whale’s blowing of water above the surface. Certainly the stakes are high and the profits from sensitive – and time-sensitive – information about personalities are high. One wonders how much of a deterrent a conditional discharge verdict will have, or is intended to have, not only on the defendants and other people in their fields, but media outlets.
So, no good trying to guess how much passing of PNC and other confidential information (such as telephone bills itemising who speaks to who and for how long) goes on. The authorities cannot even say how much passing of information goes on for fraud in general, let alone an aspect of fraud – if you define diverting information to media outlets, for gain, as a fraud.
Look at it another way. The raw material of the media is information. As with ‘leaks’ of information for fraudulent purposes, the theft of PNC and other data sold to the media usually involves an insider. Here the the private investigator, stereotypically a former police officer, may come in as a conduit. But it could just as well be an insider at a telecoms or banking firm, a relatively low-grade worker, with access however to customer or other databases. Insiders passing snippets to the press is as old as the hills. In his memoir Timebends, the late playwright Arthur Miller recalled wondering how details of his and his then wife Marilyn Monroe’s kitchen-table life while living in Britain in the mid-1950s got into the papers. A police officer when called in ferociously threatened a Hungarian house-keeper with deportation; the leaks stopped. For as long as there are such things as Hollywood and the royal family, and low-paid staff in their midst willing to pass on tidbits, there will be ‘leaks’ to the ravenous press.
However, public servants too cannot necessarily keep secrets to themselves. As fraud investigators will tell you, those who pass on key corporate details to the real fraudsters do not necessarily do it for huge sums, or even any sum. To give another postwar example, when footballer Bill Wright got married at a register office, the registrar (who normally did not give the time of day to the press) rang up the local reporter and gave a heavy hint of the scoop, simply because it was something the registrar couldn’t keep to himself.
It’s easy to see what the newsdesks see in news derived from private investigators, or tip-offs that lead to news articles. What are the rules? Under ‘clandestine devices and subterfuge’ the Code of Practice, enforced by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) (http://www.pcc.org.uk) says: “The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices; or by intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails; or by the unauthorised removal of documents or photographs. ii) Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.” As for the definition of that catch-all phrase, the ‘public interest’, the code adds: “The public interest includes, but is not confined to: i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety; ii) Protecting public health and safety; or iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation.”
How widespread is newsdesks’ commissioning of private investigators? To repeat, it is impossible to say for sure, because media outlets will not speak about their routines – ironically, given that the media are in the cases above going into the details of the non-public lives of VIPs. There is an overlap between media and private investigators (PIs). It can be that information turned up by a PI is added to a media journalist’s article, which is printed with the journalist’s byline. Say, for instance, a business has an interest in something negative about a rival going into print. There is nothing to stop the newspaper investigating, but the business can help the newspaper by bringing the facts to the newspaper, whether dug up by a hired journalist or a PI.
Meanwhile the Security Industry Authority website says: “You will need an SIA licence if you are engaged in surveillance, inquiries or investigations for the purpose of obtaining information about a person(s) activities or whereabouts, or the circumstances by which property has been lost or damaged. The SIA is expecting to begin licensing private investigators in 2006. We will be conducting extensive consultations with industry stakeholders in due course.”
Given that broad definition, what is the difference between the investigative or the freelance journalist and the private investigator? There is overlap; the investigative journalist using the Freedom of Information Act and at home doing off-diary news items can do work as a PI, or vice versa, or one can even train the other. The PCC was set up to self-regulate regional and national newspapers and periodicals. Might journalists who ring contacts to ask their business, and reporters who resort to Freedom of Information requests to get scoops from public bodies, have to get a licence to practice? That is a matter of politics. UK journalists have been able to avoid regulation by the state or some quango because the media has argued, successfully, that it should be free. Anyone can call themselves a journalist – from 2006, when the SIA gets to work, you cannot simply call yourself a PI.
What’s the difference between digging up newsworthy facts for publication, and digging them up for an insurance company or private client? And what do we make of someone who is neither PI or journalist, but someone who calls himself either, or both? What to make of someone who works as a Inland Revenue or DVLA clerk and who (for instance) because of a single-issue protest agenda makes use of tax returns or driving licence data, to pass to an animal rights movement or a newspaper, or both?
All in all, a messy business, not the only mess of definitions for the SIA or any regulator of workforces – because people tend not to always keep to neat job definitions.
