If the information that has been reported about the BNP’s security measures are true, the BNP has nothing to worry about wrt DPA prosecution. And I agree, that the BNP can only report data theft to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

However, the intention and wording of the Data Protection Act is “viral”. If you find a USB storage disk on the street containing information about other people, that discovery does not confer new rights outside of DPA to the discoverer. You cannot use that data and your responsibility is to report the loss. The same rule applies if you discover personal information from a UK database on a web site hosted outside the UK.

Anyone who further processes the BNP list is subject to DPA unless they can argue that it will not cause harm to the data subject. Thus if a data subject can demonstrate that s/he is easily identifiable by a mash-up or similar, that person can complain to the Information Commissioner.

This is well put together. But the stereotype is aweful. The BNP are not Nazis nor racist.

Go and bum Stalin you bunch of left wing idiots.

VOTE BNP.

Why is it so funny?

HT: b3ta

Basically, the BNP has no case against anyone under DPA but the individual who leaked the info and set the ball rolling, all they have iopen are common law privacy suits a la Max Mosley.

Griffin is required to explain, but he is not necessarily culpable. The full BNP membership list is held by a small number of individuals, who are legally Data Controllers. The list is never transmitted in clear text, according to their formal mechanisms. Local branches only receive a list of local members which is sent to them in encrypted format.

Griffin can comfortably argue that he has employed mechanisms that protect the data. The attack on Griffin has to be about whether he placed too much trust in the people with lists. The same argument, no doubt, goes on in every corporate data centre.

I think reports such as today’s demonstrate why the BNP can’t currently be accepted into the family of democratic politics and be given an equal seat at the negotiating table.

In a different era their behaviour would be called treason and be punished accordingly, but we have evolved beyond those brutal times and no longer need to take recourse to extreme persecution because we have an institutional framework which enables us to prosecute our case more rationally.

Until the BNP publically and unequivocally renounces violent and underhand methods and stops trying to subvert the political system for their narrow ends I think it is perfectly fair that the rest of us should be able to stand together in solidarity and make demands of them.

And until they do so they will inevitably provoke a reaction from less restrained members of society, which I can neither condone or condemn. They are responsible to themselves for the way people respond to them, as are we all.

The fact that 10,000+ people are willing to “join” the BNP (accepting those numbers) means very little. The number of donations from unique individuals would be more meaningful, and more comparable to donations to mainstream or minority political parties. But those figures only quantify bad thought, not activists.

I wrote previously on my misgivings about analysing the leaked data. If I was a Searchlighter, the list might tell me that, (random percentage) 25% of fascist activists are allegedly members of the BNP, but that activist total would be tiny compared to the total number of BNP members. Most fascist/Nazi activists are not on that list. The list primarily defines passive racists who don’t wear bomber jackets and who don’t deliver excrement through letter boxes. There may be an outlier individual on the list who has not been previously spotted by Searchlight or the security services, but their use of the list comes under the “public interest” defence.

That said, it doesn’t mean I’m opposed to taking on the BNP’s arguments and finding out ways to draw voters away from them. This post certainly does not go away from that.

But it ridicules the BNP, and its leadership and makes ordinary people even less likely to put their faith in Nick Griffin. I am firmly in favour of that because to me undermining the BNP leadership is an important tactic against them. If you don’t agree, fine. Everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.

Clearly, the leakers of the list of names (I decline to refer to it as a membership list) are in breach of the Act. But what about the compilers of mash-ups that access data which may be held in databases elsewhere? They may believe that they are innocent of breaking the law because they do not directly hold the data. But Out-Law’s definition of a Data Controller (“A data controller is the person who determines the purposes for which, and the manner in which, any personal data is, or is likely to be, processed. In other words, you will be a data controller if the processing of personal data is undertaken for your benefit and you decide what personal data should be processed and why.”) suggests that they are responsible. The act of creating a mash-up requires that they process data using a computer, and given that the individuals who provided the data did not consent, then those who process the data are on dodgy ground. One defence might be that they used anonymised data, but if they are using six digit post codes (which may identify a single household) that defence is very weak. [If you have a census record handy, note how the editors occasionally omit bits of data about non-white households in a small area that is predominantly white.]

If I was looking to employ a webby, database sort of programmer, I would definitely try to identify the individuals who created the mash-ups. They don’t understand the concepts of privacy or data protection, and thus cannot be trusted. The fact that data has leaked, against the wishes of the data subjects, does not mean that you can use it for entertainment, political research etc. My opinion of those who fail to understand this basic principle is diminished.

As a liberal, I agree that there are times when the law should be ignored or deliberately broken, or when it is moral to breach a personal confidence, but this is not one of those times. Should you wish to know the identity of your political opponents, you can stay inside the law or conventional morals by traditional techniques: canvassing, attending public meetings, looking at who signs the nomination forms etc. You’ll learn far more about the BNP that way.

Note 1: My understanding of data protection law comes from being a sys admin, not a lawyer.

Note 2: There are some cases where presence of a name on the list raises a public interest defence for disclosure. That excludes about 11,900 of them.

That depends on how those members contribute.

Are they members or event-attending kool-aid drinkers?

Not every Labour member has attended a local party meeting. I suspect many BNP members are similarly dis-connected with the party en masse. I have relatives who didn’t join UKIP simply because they thought they were an off-shoot of the BNP. I explained that UKIP were not the BNP (merely a comedy Tory off-shoot) and they were surprised.

Not everyone is as politically savvy as us. Many of the BNP membership may well have bought into the increasingly inclusive, value-based policies of the modern BNP.

We should be careful of any sort of organised attack against BNP ‘members’.

Not sure I agree with this. I’ll concede that not all those who vote BNP are necessarily racists, but there’s a pretty big difference between just voting for a party and actually joining that party. Membership of an organisation implies you’re signed up to that organisation’s ideology/politics/hate-fest/call it what you will, so it’s a much stronger statement of support than simply ticking a box on a voting slip.

You’re right in some aspects.

But it’s not only Labour that have abandoned their base for a mad dash to the centre.

Tories have too abandoned their base in the search for the dwindling political oxygen in the middle ground. Such is the perceived need for middle class voters, all parties have vacated a holistic approach to politics for a desperate race to capture the rump.

Those marginalised will always seek comfort with radical elements.

It is this partisan divide that separates us. I have no party.

Being a member of the BNP does not make you a racist.

Oddly I have always found people who mutter darkly about immigrants taking jobs and benefits and houses fit very well into the definition of racism. I do not think that every member of the BNP is fundamentally nasty but I do think that they are all racist.

http://momentsofc.blogspot.com/2008/11/privacy-and-left-reply-to-sunny-hundal.html

“Surely there must be a level of disquiet when privileged people gleefully make working class people unemployed for their political views”

Their views on race mean they cannot do their job. Period. How can a copper do his job when he is a member of an organisation that given half a chance would have all non white english sent out of the country??? If a copper was found to be a member of the Nation of Islam do you think his position would be tenable? Hell no. And if this truly is a democracy then why have succesive governments stopped Louis Farakhan coming into the country? Because his views may stoke racial trouble. A bit like Griffin, but oh hang on he is english so his freedom of speech neds defending. And it is only coppers that could lose their job NO ONE else.
And anyway if not all BNP members are racist then at least now they have a damn good idea about what their party is really all about. That was hard to type as I don’t believe a word of it!

But unless I’m mistaken, it wasn’t Sunny.”

Exactly! He is just coming on here to concern troll.