Kroll, the City of London Police and my blog

Happy new year dear blog readers.

Last year this blog had its biggest ever-readership
27,000 hits for 2010, up from 22,000 hits in 2009. Alas, its not quite call for skipping round the office, high-fiving my online journalistic success, the number of returning visitors has declined. I see these people as being folk I used to go drinking with before I moved to London, and slowly they're forgetting I exist.

Furthermore, it was in the first half of the year when the site got the most visitors.

The most popular posts being ones where I'd used magic google-juice to summon the search engine traffic (putting the right key words in the url), such as the Hollie Creig story and the Paul Chambers Twitter Joke thing.

For the latter half of the year, I've been blogging less and my subject matter has been boring.

That said, there's been one or two exciting moments, like when I blogged a moan about my temp agency messing up passing me for a week, and within minutes of clicking "PUBLISH POST", my mobile ringing with someone from their head office, raining down a firestorm on the local office, I got my money in the end. I feel a little guilty cos I was partly to blame. Anyhoo, I took that post down, fearing for my job, even though the company I work in are quite different from the company who pays me.

There was another thrilling post where I was frustrated by the amount of time it was taking my former housing renting landlord folk to give me my deposit back. They took a few hours before phoning me, the money arrived shortly after and they even phoned back the next day to ask that I update the blog post.

This is the future, rather than actually phoning helplines, just write arsey blogpost about stuff, let google do its work and someone else can run round resolving any problems.

Its a thrilling way to live.

The other week I was inspired to write a blogpost about some banner that had been strung up over a road, this blogpost in fact.

One thing I didn't mention in the original post was Kroll, they're a private investigation company who it is alleged under the auspices of Guy Carpenter, persuaded the City of London Police to expend vast resources on bringing Ian Puddick to justice.

A day or two after I clicked publish post, I noticed a Kroll ISP address in the server logs, as having read my blog. I was terrified, I felt threatened and intimidated. So, in a funk I took the blogpost offline until my nerves had calmed and I'd stopped shaking. It took quite a few sleepless nights, but eventually I thought "fuck it, live by the blog, die by the blog". I've lost countless relationships and jobs cos of this philosophy, I'm crazy, but I get the job done.

Its a weird thing about threatening and intimidating things, its all in the eye of the beholder.

I discovered a neat thing about my ADSL wifi routery thing, I can rename it anything, and so whenever my neighbours search for their networks they'll find one nearby called "MI5 mobile surveillance unit 23".

Is it Kroll's fault that I felt threatened by their ISP's appearance in my server logs? Well yes, they did hunt down my website. On the other hand I am just being a pussy by being intimidated by such things?

I dunno. Should I fuck with Kroll? Probly not. But does this blogpost count as fucking with Kroll? Well, that's up to them, innit?

There is another angle...

As part of my job, I spend hours at work randomly surfing the web, reading up on episodes of Lost or V or obscure statistics about far off lands. Its not really part of my job, just that I am incapable of doing productive work unless I have some kind of inoffensive release for my curious mind, without it, my work rate would fall.

Perhaps, Kroll appeared in my server logs because my counterpart, some underpaid temp at Kroll, was bored in his lunch break and arrived at the aforementioned blogpost randomly, with no prejudice or malicious intent.

This is how wars start, people feeling needlessly threatened. We could all do with being a little more like Samantha Smith.

Opting out

This morning I was trying to think of example reasons for why you'd want to opt out of having your medical records in the NHS's database thing, and whilst I could come up with many theoretical hypotheses, the only concrete examples I could come up with was the possibility of your details being leaked or lost or left on a hard disk on a train along with a few hundred thousand other people's details.

Its not really that convincing, cos in such a case there would be a few hundred thousand other people in the same boat and there'd be a case for some kind of class act.

However, via Dizzy Thinks, we find that Greenwich Council are cross referencing their payrole records with council tax and housing records to see if any of their own staff owes them any money. They have to inform the staff that they're doing such a thing.

Its probably not quite what the council employees had in mind when they took up their jobs, that their employer would be seeking out new and exciting ways of extracting money from them.

So aye, at some point in the future, the NHS could decide to mine their records for anything that could be used to extract more money from you, which is why its wise to opt out.

Brent Council FOI - FAIL

Here's an interesting thing, I was ploughing through WhatDoTheyKnow.com, looking for something interesting to write about, and found it.

Brent Council are refusing to send replies to FOI requests to the whatdotheyknow.com website. A chap called Michael Bimmlermmer sent them a Freedom of Information request about it.

I have read about your new policy of not sending replies to FOI requests to the whatdotheyknow.com website.

I would like to request access to all internal records concerning this policy change, including but not limited to internal emails, memoranda, letters and notes as well as records of meetings. Moreover I should like a copy of the formal decision of the policy change or if such does not exist, the announcement distributed about it to staff.

I am also grateful for answers to the following questions (which you may or may not decide to treat as business-as-usual instead of FOI requests)

1. Who made the final decision on this policy change? (Name and/or Job title)
2. Who was consulted beforehand?
3. Was legal advice requested?
4. Was the ICO contacted and if yes, what was their reply?

Whilst they don't answer any of the questions put, they do explain why, they're claiming republishing FOIs online may infringe copyright:-

However, whilst we may send the formal notification of the decision to the email address you have provided we will not send the information requested to that address. This is because we are aware that doing so will automatically result in the information being published on the whatdotheyknow website. Publication of information in this way may constitute an unauthorised re-use (under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005) and may infringe copyright. I would therefore be grateful if you will provide me with an alternative disclosure address.

This can be a postal address, fax number or an email address, as long as it does not result in automatic publication and re-use.

It seems a bit rum, and Brent Council are refusing dozens of other FOI requests, here, here, here etc