Robin Wilton's esoterica

The UK's newest Home Secretary, John Reid, has sent one of his ministers to the United States to find out how to manage the 'controlled release' of information about offenders, by studying the American implementation of Megan's Law.

Interesting though that exercise may be, I have to wonder whether any lessons he learns can effectively be transplanted into the UK environment. As regular readers will know, we've recently been analysing identity management questions in terms of the legal, regulatory and best practice 'layers'. It seems to me that in the areas of freedom of information and privacy, there are significant differences between the US and the UK - constitutionally, in policy and enforcement 'best practice', and also in the culture of information availability.

For instance, back in March I described the differences between the UK and US approaches to publishing information about currently imprisoned offenders. There are differences in the scope and definition of Personally Identifiable Information, differences in the culture of "naming and shaming" of offenders, differences in law and attitudes towards privacy. For instance: the 4th and 9th Amendments to the US constitution raise implications of privacy, but these are not explicit and are not direct equivalents of the UK's Human Rights Act'sestablishment of each citizen's "right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

As this post and this Privacy International article also illustrate, the differences surfaced recently with the EU revocation of the US-UK data sharing agreement on airline passenger information.

So given all these dissimilarities, why is the Home Secretary so interested in a data publication regime for offender information?

Partly it arises from recent press exposure of the fact that 11 government-approved hostels, used to house at least 60 released child sex offenders, are located adjacent to schools.

It's not obvious to me that the solution to that problem is to publish information about released offenders. It seems to me that he should be considering remedial action about where it's appropriate to locate such hostels in the first place, and about the probation and supervisory regimes under which they operate. But then, the Home Office has been under fire recently for shortcomings in just that.

For instance, a convicted paedophile admitted to having raped a 9-year-old girl while he was out and under probationary supervision. Offenders on probation also murdered Mary-Ann Leneghan in Reading and John Monckton in London. The Home Secretary (Charles Clarke at the time) reacted by promising tougher supervision regimes; judges and probation staff said the supervision system was already overloaded. But the underlying question is: why are schools and probation centres adjacent to each other anyway? That's a matter of planning policy which is under the control of public administration.

I think there are other issues with the 'controlled information release' plan, too. Once released (even if in a 'controlled' way) the information becomes a permanent record;there would be a strong incentive for unregulated individuals and citizens to re-publish such information, and those copies would be outside the control of the original publisher. If they are in error, there's a strong likelihood of copies outside the control of the issuer cannot be corrected if in error, so errors persist.

There's been much comment recently about how tough it is for the victims of identity theft to 'clean up' their identities thereafter. Imagine the implications of having to try to expunge a wrong record of paedophilia. The Home Office would have to be absolutely certain of the accuracy, integrity and currency of its information - and its record in the management of identity information has not exactly been unblemished of late.

Against that background, the 'US study tour' looks less like a seriously viable prelude to legislation, and more like an attempt to divert attention from the real problem.

Postscript: here's some further comment from BBC interviews today.