Interpol chief slams UK on terror database cooperation
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Too much toothpaste panic, not enough checks on suspects The boss of Interpol has slammed Britain's procedures for monitoring suspected international terrorists.â¦
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Proposals for identity cards and a population register are opposed by Britain's information watchdog.
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PEOPLE who doubt that Britain is facing a real international terrorist threat from al-Qaeda and similar groups are deluding themselves, the head of MI5 said yesterday.
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LONDON  - Police and intelligence agencies have prevented international terrorists from striking Britain by disrupting their planned attacks, the head of London's police said Sunday.
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A leading police chief has attacked the London 2012 Olympic board&#39;s security plans.
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Britain's highest court on Thursday harshly condemned one of the most hotly disputed elements of the country's anti-terrorist strategy &#151; a law allowing some foreign suspects to be locked up indefinitely with no charge.
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Jacqui Smith defends her department from claim UK counter-terror effort is "in the wrong century".
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Charles Kennedy accuses the home secretary of using terror fears to push through illiberal measures.
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British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw complained to his US counterpart Colin Powell about the deportation from the United States of former pop star Cat Stevens as a possible terrorist risk, a senior State Department official said.
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Downing Street says claims that the UK is a police state for Muslims are "categorically wrong".
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Charles Clarke suffered a growing backlash against his plans to hold British terror suspects under house arrest without trial as he revealed that their families and friends could also be subject to sanctions.
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The head of the U.K. National Health Service has defended plans to build a centralized database of patient records following another embarrassing loss of personal information by the government.The U.K. Department of Health admitted this weekend that nine of its regional NHS trusts have reported losing patient data. One of the trusts, the City and Hackney Primary Care Trust, in east London, lost the medical records for about 160,000 children, according to newspaper reports. The total number of records has not been disclosed.The losses emerged as part of a wider review following similar government blunders, and have revived questions about the security of building a centralized patient records database, part of the U.K.&#39;s National Programme for IT (NPfIT). But David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, said the project is essential and should go ahead.&quot;It&#39;s vitally important that when a doctor is sitting in front of a patient they have all the information they need at their fingertips, and that&#39;s what&#39;s been driving us through all this,&quot; Nicholson told BBC Radio 4&#39;s Today program on Monday.The proposed system will not be a single large records database, but a series of interconnected regional databases, he said. And the security system will be more rigorous than that used with most Internet banking systems, according to Nicholson.&quot;You&#39;d need a user name, a password and a smart card [to access patient records] and you would have role-controlled access,&quot; he said. &quot;So a nurse on a ward with a smart card and a password could only access a relatively small number of patient records.&quot;The information that was reported lost over the weekend was encrypted and so not vulnerable to misuse, Nicholson said.But Ross Anderson, a security expert at the University of Cambridge, told Radio 4 that whether the data is encrypted is not the main issue.&quot;One of the questions you have to ask here is not whether the data was encrypted or password protected, but why someone was able to have access to 160,000 children&#39;s records,&quot; he said. &quot;In private industry ... if someone tried to make off with hundreds of thousands of records the alarms would sound.&quot;Opposition leaders pounced on the latest misstep as evidence that the Labour government can&#39;t be trusted with its citizens&#39; data. They called for further studies to show how the proposed patient records system would protect privacy.The incident comes after the U.K.&#39;s HM Revenue and Customs lost personal records for 25 million Britons, and the Driving Standards Agency lost records for more than 3 million learner drivers.&quot;The power of technology means it can be very easy to use the information, but also very easy to lose the information,&quot; the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said on the Today program. &quot;The events of the last few weeks have woken up everybody to the importance of taking these matters seriously.&quot;&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - Executives from the financial data transfer company Swift and the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) faced tough questions in a European Parliament committee meeting Wednesday, about the illegal sharing of private data with U.S. authorities. ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet denied that the bank should have stepped in to prevent the breach of European data protection laws, saying that the bank could only advise the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication SCRL (Swift). "We have no judicial competence in the field of data protection," he said. Swift's Chief Financial Officer Francis van Bever explained that the company has two information storage facilities, one in the U.S. and the other in Holland. Each facility holds identical data: they serve as back-ups for each other in case one were to crash. "Each facility is subject to local laws," Van Bever said. "We were obliged to respond to the subpoena from the U.S. authorities." European law is unclear, he said, adding that after getting external legal advice in Belgium, Swift concluded that transferring the data to the U.S. authorities would be legal. "We didn't check with local data protection authorities because we thought what we were doing was legal," he said. U.S. agencies ordered Swift to share millions of pieces of information about people and companies from around the world in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The information was deemed essential in tracing the financing of terrorism, and Swift complied with the order. However, European data protection laws forbid transfers of European citizens' personal data outside the E.U. if the country receiving the data has aÂ weaker data protection regimeÂ than Europe's. The U.S. is considered such a country under European laws. In June the New York Times revealed that Swift has been sharing the data with U.S. authorities for years, sparking investigations in Europe into how the European laws could so easily have been breached. Last week, Belgium's privacy commission concluded a two-month investigation, accusing Swift of breaking Belgian and Europe-wide data protection laws. However, it stopped short of proposing fines for the company, which it agreed was caught between conflicting legal requirements on each side of the Atlantic. Many European parliamentarians drew a parallel between the Swift case and the ongoing attempts to strike a data sharing agreement that would allow the U.S. authorities access to personal data about passengers flying to the U.S.. They were unimpressed by what more than one member of the European parliament referred to as "buck-passing" when it came to handing out responsibility for the data protection breach. Trichet tried to move the debate beyond casting blame by suggesting ways of avoiding similar problems in future. "This problem is ongoing," he said. "The system we have in place is imperfect. It is very important to clarify the situation and work out what to do about such data transfers across the Atlantic." He added that any agreement between the E.U. and the U.S. should then form the basis for a global solution, because the problem is worldwide. "We need a global legal framework for situations like this," Trichet said. Swift's van Bever agreed. "We would welcome such clarification," he said, adding that the double taxation treaty could be a role model. The treaty is signed by many countries around the world and is designed to prevent people being taxed twice on the same income by different tax authorities.
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Â· CPA was dysfunctional, says British official  Â· UK 'complicit' in failing to prepare postwar plan
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Britain&#39;s highest court on Thursday harshly condemned one of the most hotly disputed elements of the country&#39;s anti-terrorist strategy - a law allowing some foreign suspects to be locked up indefinitely with no charge.
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Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg accuses Gordon Brown of turning Britain into a "surveillance state".
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The Conservatives on Wednesday demanded a government statement on the handling of data on foreign crime suspects after authorities admitted they had failed for a year to match details sent by the Dutch police on 15 serious crime suspects held in the British DNA police databank.