By Lisa Bryant
SYDNEY — When the Hawke government suggested an Australia-wide identity system (the Australia Card), public opposition forced it to abandon the plan because of fears of potential misuse of the data collected for the card. Yet a database more technologically advanced than any secret police system and potentially holding more data than the Australia Card was introduced in NSW on April 4 with only a small outcry.
The Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) is a new computer system developed for the New South Wales Police Service. According to the police, the system is "an integrated law enforcement system designed with a focus on operational policing functions, developed to enable a law enforcement organisation to capture, access and analyse crime information and intelligence on an organisation wide basis". In plain English, it is a massive database that will contain all information that the NSW police have collected and will collect about the public.
The NSW ombudsman, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), the Privacy Committee and members of the public have expressed grave fears about the potential of the system to be misused.
COPS, developed for the police by Anderson Consulting, is high tech in the extreme. So much so that it reeks of Big Brother.
A crime occurs in a street; say it is your street. The police, eventually through a patrol car-based computer, will be able to call up all "persons of interest" living in your street.
Who are persons of interest? Basically any person ever met in the course of policing. Did you report the last time your house was broken into? Then you are a person of interest. Have you been involved in a traffic accident? You are a person of interest. Have you got an old criminal record from the time you were caught smoking marijuana as a student? You are a person of interest. Have you been the victim of domestic violence? You are a person of interest. How the police will use the massive list that such an inquiry will generate is yet to be seen, but you can bet that in house-to-house interviews, persons of interest will be the first targeted.
Imagine this scenario. Ten years ago you had a fight with your landlord about the return of your bond money, during which the police were called. You are now looking for a new house to rent and are surprised when application after application is rejected.
What you don't know is that a police officer has decided to supplement his income by running checks through COPS for real estate agents. Every time your name comes up that old incident appears (even though neither you nor the landlord was charged). Prospective tenants are not in short supply, so why would a real estate agent risk you?
That could happen now: it doesn't need a new computer system to allow corrupt police to misuse information. But the frightening aspects of COPS is how easy it can be for a corrupt police officer to access that information and how much bigger that database will be. COPS will centralise information that has been held in paper files or less accessible computer databases.
Also, the information contained within COPS will be instantly accessible to any serving police officer (currently numbering 13,000) in NSW. As Chris Puplick of the Privacy Committee points out, this will be regardless of "experience, training or rank".
How real is this threat? In January 1992 the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC)uncovered "a network of former and serving police officers through which confidential government information was readily obtained". Despite the ICAC Inquiry on the Unauthorised Release of Government Information, it is too much to presume that all corrupt police have now been weeded out of the force.
Privacy
The Privacy Committee has expressed grave concerns about COPS, calling it "a significant threat to privacy and other basic rights". One of its concerns was that it could be used to target individuals and groups in a discriminatory way. The part of the COPS system called intelligence, according to a police handout on the system, "supports recording relationships between entities of interest". In other words, once COPS classifies a person as a "person of interest", it automatically links information about that person.
The Privacy Committee suggested the erection of "internal barriers to prevent officers searching COPS outside their own areas of responsibility". As it is, a police officer can inquire on any aspect of COPS regardless of what s/he is working on. This aspect particularly worried the NSW ombudsman, David Landa, who stated that the system is "open to corruption".
There is no restriction on any police officer gaining access to sensitive types of information such as information on victims of sexual assault, child abuse or domestic violence.
The development of COPS first came to public attention in the NSW Police Service Annual Report in 1991. In 1992 the state government's Capital Works Committee halted all funds to the project because of its concern about the mounting cost of the system. At that stage, the system had cost $4.9 million already and the Police Department was asking for another $6 million. It has cost $20 million to date.
In September 1992 the then head of ICAC, Ian Temby, met with the then minister for police, Ted Pickering, the attorney general and the minister for justice, outlining ICAC's concerns about the "security" of COPS. Pickering put the system on hold because of ICAC's concerns, but funding was reinstated under the new police minister, Terry Griffiths.
The Privacy Committee set out a series of concerns with COPS in a letter to the police commissioner, Tony Lauer at the end of March 1994. These were that COPS could be used to target individuals or groups in a discriminatory way, that information would not just be on criminals, but on everyone the police come into contact with, that all police officers would have access to it and that it was open to corruption.
The committee recommended that an independent external auditing and review body report to a parliamentary committee on a regular basis about COPS. It also highlighted the need for effective data protection legislation and stated that further system safeguards were needed.
John Marsden, a member of the NSW Police Board and former NSW Law Society president, condemned the system as an "extremely dangerous" "police Australia card".
David Landa accused the police of refusing to adopt safeguards to avert the misuse of confidential information. He suggested that the system be changed so that "to access confidential information, police would have to record a reason for access before admission was gained to the system".
This suggestion was rejected by the police because "The COPS Focus Group considered that staff would not enter the real reason for log-on but would instead enter a generic reason such as 'for my duties'".
So because police officers cannot be trusted to record honestly their reasons for accessing COPS, they can have free access to confidential records. Reassuring isn't it?
Terry Griffiths ordered the Police Service to review the security safeguards of the system after Landa's attack, but it has been introduced with basically no new safeguards.
As a response to the ICAC report into misuse of government information and to allay some concerns about COPS, the attorney general, John Hannaford, introduced a "Privacy and Data Protection" bill. The legislation was dismissed as inadequate by the Privacy Committee, which said that exemptions relating to criminal investigation "are so wide as to be capable of being used to defeat the purposes of the bill entirely".
Information is a powerful weapon. Technology is too. Are we sure that we want to give the already well-armed police these two new weapons? Can we be sure that one day these weapons will not be aimed at us?