Erasing David
May 5th, 2010 at 10:10 UTC by Ross Anderson
Last night’s documentary Erasing David shows how private eyes tracked down a target by making false pretext telephone calls to the NHS. By pretending to be him they found out when he and his wife were due to attend an ante-natal clinic, and ambushed him as he came out.
The NHS has form on this. Back in 1995 the BMA got me to draw up guidelines for dealing with phone calls; they appeared in the BMJ on Jan 13 1996. When staff at the N Yorks Health Authority were trained to follow these guidelines, they found 30 false-pretext calls a week. When the BMA reported this to the Chief Medical Officer and asked him to implement the protocol throughout the NHS, he was furious at our interference in “his” admninistrative procedures. The NYHA was ordered to stop. I told the story in my book.
I have long considered it unacceptable for the NHS to continue to ignore operational security. The new electronic record systems at a number of hospitals give receptionists access not just to appointment details but to clinical data too. So things are significantly worse than in 1996, and new national systems such as the SCR will compound the problem. The next secretary of state needs to get his act together.
Entry filed under: Legal issues, News coverage, Politics
5 comments Add your own
1. Barney | May 5th, 2010 at 14:31 UTC
Is that the right link to your book? I can’t see anything about NYHA or the NHS in the linked PDF. What page do you tell the story on?
2. David | May 5th, 2010 at 14:43 UTC
Indeed, the correct link would be to Chapter 8, section 8.2.3.1: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-08.pdf
3. Ross Anderson | May 5th, 2010 at 14:45 UTC
You’re right; it was chapter 8, not chapter 6 – a typo. We also referred to the incident in FIPR testimony to the health committee and elsewhere.
4. paul | May 6th, 2010 at 11:20 UTC
Cerberus should be investigated by the Information commisioners office. They have broken the law and those that received the information have also broken the law.
5. Ross Anderson | May 7th, 2010 at 13:06 UTC
Good video interviews, with particularly pointed references to opting out of the SCR – about which I blogged earlier and about which Victoria Dacey has extracted some interesting information using the Freedom of Information Act.
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