Editorial: The atrocious data breach means that MI5 cannot rely on the PSNI to keep vital intelligence secure

There was cross-party agreement that the apparently inadvertent release of the names of officers and their roles and work locations was a serious blunder.

It is welcome that there was such consensus, but at the same time there was an almost repetitious quality to the criticisms of police leaders. Lessons must be learnt, we were told, and officers need to be assured of their safety. But how, for example, can the PSNI officers who was identified as working alongside MI5 feel anything other than deep anxiety? Compensation for some or all PSNI officers, if it comes to that, will not only be massively costly at a time of severe public financial constraints, it won’t make anyone safer, unless they get hundreds of thousands of pounds to move home or even move out of NI, as well as perhaps change career. That is not feasible in monetary or human resource terms. Who would replace them?

Thus officers feel unsafe, even if – by chance – they are not unsafe because the list of overall names was not copied by anyone with ill intent in the time it was publicly available. That the home addresses of officers was not divulged is a mercy amidst this atrocious security breach, but terrorists in receipt of the list that was released would try to set names against other data in the public domain that might help identify people.

London should assess how safe it is to share security information with the police in Northern Ireland, supposedly an integral part of the UK, and whether they can introduce their own safeguards to protect the life-saving intelligence services in NI, and police who work with them, given that PSNI cannot be relied upon to keep such data secure.