Nadine Dorries reveals shocking breaches of data security as Damian Green porn saga thickens

There’s a reason we call her ‘Mad Nad’, folks.

Yes, Mid Bedfordshire Tory MP Nadine Dorries has leapt to the defence of Damian Green, by triggering a data protection controversy that could engulf any number of MPs and their office staff as well.

The allegation – as we all know by now, right? – is that First Secretary of State Damian Green, the man in the second-highest political job in the land, who stands accused of inappropriate behaviour towards a lady called Kate Maltby, was found to have been misusing Parliamentary computers by using them to watch porn, as long ago as 2008.

Former police officers have been lining up to publicise evidence that a computer in Mr Green’s office was used to access thousands of pornographic images, saying he must have been the culprit as he was logged in when the images were viewed.

But Ms Dorries leapt into the fray on Saturday evening, pointing out:

Oh, really?

We’ll come back to this, but first, we need to remember that Mr Green has denied viewing porn on the computer in question – to Parliament. If he did, then he knowingly lied to Parliament – an offence that, if proved, should mean his political career is over.

Could it have been someone else in his office team, then? Well…

That’ll be a ‘no’, then. But let’s remember that, in most offices, being the person logged into a computer when it accessed pornography would be an offence for which the punishment would be the sack.

Okay – back to Ms Dorries and her allegation that other people log in to Westminster computers, using MPs’ details “everyday”.

If she’s right, then she has confessed to a major breach of the Data Protection Act – and went on to implicate “all staff”, opening a can of worms that should be disgorging its contents for a considerable amount of time:

Some of us wanted the Information Commissioner to investigate this allegation of serious and widespread data protection abuses:

https://twitter.com/A_C_McGregor/status/937061674342846464

https://twitter.com/Wirral_In_It/status/937306421577895936

Others pointed out that most organisations consider it an open-and-shut case that, if a computer is found to have accessed pornography while a particular user was logged in, then that user must be responsible for viewing it and must accept the consequences.

Ms Dorries took issue with this (she is ‘Mad Nad’, after all) – and let herself in for a serial slapdown that bordered on dogpiling.

https://twitter.com/FollowingFX/status/937036569759879168

Apparently Tory MPs like Ms Dorries and Mr Green believe they operate above the law. Interesting, that…

Here comes another useful snippet: Nobody in any MP’s office needs their boss’s full login details to handle emails, as Ms Dorries had claimed. See John O’Shea’s tweet below:

Ah,  but perhaps Parliament doesn’t consider porn viewing during working hours to be as serious a matter as elsewhere? The following suggests not:

Now, some commenters have pointed out that the DWP is just one government department, and the guidelines don’t date back to 2008. Fair enough. But it seems unreasonable to suggest the DWP’s guidelines wouldn’t at least be based on guidelines for all government departments – and it also seems unreasonable to expect those guidelines to have been introduced after computers and the internet were first installed in Parliament/government offices.

What do these revelations mean in the short term? Here are Luke Parks (telling us what the officials will be demanding) and Mark Keogan (explaining that it won’t make a scrap of difference, if Ms Dorries’ claims are accurate):

Meanwhile, other commenters have taken issue with media coverage suggesting that the former police officers brought forward evidence against Mr Green vindictively. Coverage, notably by the BBC, has included interviews with people who suggested that police are disgruntled with the Conservative Party for changes to their pay and conditions that have made it much harder to do their job.

Members of the public disagree vocally:

While the pornography found on the computer wasn’t illegal, and it isn’t illegal to view pornography on an office computer (simply sackable according to the rules of individual organisations, for what should be obvious reasons), Ms Rowe (above) makes the very good point that it’s possible the evidence would have disappeared if the ex-officers in question had gone through official channels. And if he did watch the porn, let’s remember that Mr Green would be guilty of lying to Parliament, and of an offence that would result in the sacking of any office worker. Why should he be exempt from the same treatment?

https://twitter.com/Panopticon6/status/937026997955506176

Yes he is – whether guilty of any of the transgressions alleged about him or not.


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9 Comments

  1. Nick December 4, 2017 at 12:26 am - Reply

    i don’t believe her’ only a fool would allow someone else to log in to a personal computer based in the house of commons

    any intern would have their own computer with its on isp address. The sharing of any computer is high risk and with a intern being only there for a few weeks would be reckless to say the least to allow that person to use the mp’s computer

  2. Sal December 4, 2017 at 12:34 am - Reply

    I think we may be seeing real ignorance of normal working practices and conventions. Someone who has gone into politics straight from Oxford may never have learned those basics. Still a lot of it about. NB This is not an excuse, but an extra aspect of the problem, to consider!

    • John December 4, 2017 at 9:04 am - Reply

      I used to work in an external govt department, i.e. NOT parliament level, and (certainly in our area), whenever we had temporary staff at least, they were given temporary logons. AFAIK, no logons were shared or anything like that. The temp logons never seemed to take long to do. People were trained up in how to logon etc, use various software etc. If ‘logon abuse’ IS going on in parliament offices, it seems that their security isn’t quite the same that they subject others to. It would, in a sense, make a complete mockery of govt security (certainly on the computer side of things).

  3. JohnDee December 4, 2017 at 3:08 am - Reply

    ” … 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑤𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑦 𝑏𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙 𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑙 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑝𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 … ” Ahhh— one rule for the plebs but the oxbridge inbreds get a free pass because they don’t mix with ‘real’ people?
    How’s that cliché go (that seems only to apply to the plebs) ” … 𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜 𝑒𝑥𝑐𝑢𝑠𝑒 … “.

  4. Dez December 4, 2017 at 9:33 am - Reply

    I guess the only element of this case that has not been revealed, and still remains silent, is the yet to be revealed the mystery watchers sexual porn preferences and is there evidence of a particular “preference” to far to add to the mounting adverse evidence.
    Despite the new anti police stance I believe it should have been revealed when first uncovered but via the right channels which unfortunately have a habit of being covered up by those in power.

  5. Signor tbf December 4, 2017 at 10:54 am - Reply

    MIKE

    I worked for DWP from 1994-2008, when I took early retirement. Even in 1994, nobody shared log-ins, or their equivalent, which consisted of a card called a Personal Identification Device(PID) inserted into the side of the computer, followed by your own individual password.

    If you cocked-up password input, you could access neither the main system, nor your individual Wordperfect documents, and you couldn’t access the latter through even a dumb terminal with no access to the main system if your sign-in didn’t match.

    IT usually got you back on line in the event of a cock-up pretty quickly, but the simple fact is, in 1994 and in 2008, the only way someone could access your account was if you left the PID in the computer after you’d correctly signed in & went for a smoke or something-it did happen quite often-wonder why the Tories haven’t tried that one??

  6. Jeremy Keller (@JeremyKeller9) December 5, 2017 at 8:39 am - Reply

    My BBC link is about Olympus Mons.

    • Mike Sivier December 5, 2017 at 9:52 am - Reply

      Perhaps I’m reading this too early in the morning after too late a night, but can anybody tell me what this is about?

  7. NMac December 5, 2017 at 10:51 am - Reply

    How bad has it got to get before Dirty Damian Green finally goes?

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