TheKeyAuthor's Blog - Posts Tagged "bsb"

Audio files were destroyed in 2008 at the High Court, but they weren't the only records that year to suffer a strange fate. On Friday 12 December, a break-in occurred at the offices of the Bar Council, which houses its regulatory arm, the Bar Standards Board (BSB):

Contact addresses of Lay members of Bar Council and Bar Standards Board committees were also stolen along with approximately 1500 original complaints records being used for new IT system testing, which includes names and contact details of the complainants, witnesses, barristers and details of the complaints....A Bar Council help line has been set up...for anyone with specific concerns about the implications of the theft.

I found out about it a few months later, as this book extract shows:

On 16 April, I received a letter from the Bar Council. They informed me that my complaint details were among those stolen in the burglary last December. My first reaction was to wonder why it had taken them over four months to tell me that. The letter provided some details of the subsequent investigation and events. The police investigation confirmed that CCTV evidence showed the theft appeared to have been committed by three young men. However, the police didn't know who they were and it seemed they couldn't match them from their files. The police were of the opinion that the chances of retrieving the hard-drives were slim. Twenty thousand barristers and Disciplinary Panel members had so far given no indication that any of the data had been read or used.
The stolen files covered my two complaints against my own barrister and Eva's. The documentation was considerable. I knew the contents of those files would interest a number of parties. Had this burglary anything to do with my case? After the destroying of audio recordings at the RCJ [Royal Courts of Justice, High Court], I didn't rule anything out.
I gave it some thought. The police were not making a lot of effort to catch the burglars. Not a single attempt had been made to make use of the financial information. But it was the timing of the theft that I found intriguing. It came the day after I sent my recorded delivery application to the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights, France]. The post-office clerk entered details of the transaction via a keypad device, which meant records were stored electronically. At that time, the British authorities knew everything that was going on and had access to everything except the records held by the BSB and the SRA.

So is there any tracking of Royal Mail post by government agencies? Well, it is owned by the British government, and they do it in the USA.

More information can be found at my campaign site. Free eBook.