UK government tops award list for unwelcome snooping

Privacy campaigners savaged Jack Straw and his civil servants on Monday night for their attempts to snoop on commercial and private communications.

Campaign group Privacy International [see link below] gave the Home Office a Lifetime Menace award for its efforts over the years to reduce corporate and personal data privacy, most recently for its role in the proposed Interception of Communications Act, which would allow police agencies to snoop on commercial data networks.

The Home Secretary received a personal award - Worst Public Official - for his enthusiastic conversion to snooping and exploitation of personal data following Labour's poll triumph in 1997. The judges - who included the editor of Computing newspaper - cited his zeal in attacking privacy rights for their decision to award the prize.

The giant credit-checking agency Experian won the Most Invasive Company award - narrowly beating Racal and BT - for its long term campaign to ensure that data protection legislation does not apply to information collected on electoral rolls. Another award winners was Borders Police for its extensive use of DNA tests on suspects.

But the awards weren't all negative. Five Winston awards - named after the hero of 1984, George Orwell's chilling vision of a totalitarian future - were handed to people who have protected or extended privacy and confidentiality.

Medical confidentiality campaigner Dr Fleur Fisher received a Lifetime Achievement award for her work in promoting information security and medical privacy in the NHS. The judges cited her insistence, while she was the British Medical Association's ethics chief, that NHS data networks be secure enough to withstand concerted snooping.

Journalist Duncan Campbell, who has written several books and countless articles (including for Computing newspaper) on electronic surveillance and data security, won a Winston for his work in exposing government snooping.

Other Winston winners this year were: Tony Bunyan director of the Statewatch research group which monitors government snooping; David Burke, author of a book published next year on the privacy dangers of digital television; and Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, who won a joint award for their ground-breaking research into the CCTV industry.

Big Brother winners are give a statuette showing a boot stamping on a human head, an image taken from Orwell's 1984. The awards started in the UK last year and have already been duplicated in the US.

The judges included journalists, academics, privacy campaigners, lawyers, and Internet industry insiders. The awards were decided over a wine-fuelled dinner in a smoke-filled room at the London School of Economics.

Douglas Hayward is the editor of Computing, which sponsored this year's awards as part of its campaign to promote the right to confidentiality in corporate and public communications. He was one of the judges.