Brickbat: Prying Eyes

Okechukwu Efobi, a sergeant with London's Metropolitan Police Service, has pleaded guilty to three counts of computer misuse for accessing a police database to monitor an investigation into his own misconduct. A court ordered him to perform 50 hours of community service and pay a total of £540 ($679) in fines and prosecution costs. He remains employed by the police department but on restricted duty.

Comments

[Aisha Wehrle]

Nice

[Inigo Montoya]

What, no extra paid vacation? He should tell his police union to get off their lazy arses and work for him! As a dues-paying corrupt cop, he deserves all the perks and protection they can provide.

[Rat on a train]

Even the police trade union confessed that same year that their members were "persistently" committing data breaches.
What kind of union are they running over there?

[Fist of Etiquette]

A court ordered him to perform 50 hours of community service and pay a total of £540 ($679) in fines and prosecution costs.

He knew that was coming because he was watching it on the court computer.

[Longtobefree]

So it will turn out that his job counts as community service, and he will file next week for a duty related stress induced medical separation - - - -

[Entropic Principle]

Sounds like a good British guy although I am sure that is a Welsh name right.

[Kevin Smith]

That guy has more vowels in his name the average Welsh family put together lol

[Minadin]

Us Welsh do love our consonants.

[Cyto]

Meh.... not that much of a brickbat, nor really much of a case of prying eyes.

Actually, if you had access to the HR system at work and you found out someone had started a secret investigation targeting you, exactly how tough would it be not to peek inside and find out what the heck was going on?

Of course, that's the real point... and that point is the ultimate source of the scare number quoted in the article. Some security company that wants to sell their services to British police departments scoured 34 different police departments and found almost 800 cases of potential data misuse over the course of a year. So maybe 25 per department each year - and we don't know anything about the disposition...

But I'd say that number is way too low. If you have a vast database with dirt on every person and business that you ever come in contact with, the temptation to do a quick lookup has to be overwhelming. Look up that guy you are meeting for a Tinder hookup. Look up that girl your son is dating. Look up that contractor who is working on your bathroom redo.....

Which is, of course, exactly the rational temptation that civil libertarians cited when objecting to the creation of huge databases of dirt resulting from mass surveillance of all of us. And it is precisely that form of misuse that all of the "rational people" in mainstream politics and the media told us would never, ever happen.

[TripK]

The linked article says 150 hours of community service...

[Don't look at me!]

Oh, well then. Completely different.