This feature relates to Watching the Detectives.
The phonehacking scandal has recently thrown into sharp focus the murky underworld of private detectives and their ability to unearth the secrets on the rich and famous. But the black market in private information isnt restricted to celebrities.
For the right price your medical records, mobile phone bills and bank statements are all available for just a few hundred pounds. Anyone can buy this illicit data from PIs who can obtain your secrets from supposedly secure government databases, banks and mobile phone companies.
We wanted to expose the information black market by investigating private detectives who were willing to break the law, and follow the data trail to discover their sources. We recruited three volunteers who offered to let use their identities for this Dispatches.
I posed as a 'security consultant' and approached private investigator outfits that were selling deep background checks. Whilst being secretly filmed, two PI firms offered a range of deeply personal information that could only be obtained by breaching the Data Protection Act.
I paid these outfits to have our volunteers checked out, and between them the PIs delivered our volunteers benefits records, criminal records, mobile phone bills, bank statements, and, most worryingly, their medical records. All of this information is illegal to sell and to procure.
I then met up with the volunteers to present their data back to them, which form some of the strongest scenes in the film. The volunteers had spent many months living with the knowledge that they were being watched and scrutinised, which had made them extremely curious and occasionally paranoid.
The volunteers were all shocked at how easy it was to dig up information that they had thought was private and restricted. One of our volunteers was especially unsettled as we had accidentally unearthed his criminal record, that he wasn't expecting us to find.
Having verified that it was in fact their real data we had bought, we then set about working out where the PIs had obtained their information.
The data could either have been blagged (by the PIs calling up banks mobile phone companies and pretending to be the volunteers) or by paying corrupt officials with access to government databases. Our health records are supposed to be kept secure by the NHS, yet over 700,000 people have access to differed parts of the NHS database.
The penalties for breaching the Data Protection Act are fines. The Information Commissioner has publicly campaigned to toughed the sanctions, and to introduce custodial sentences to curtail the information black market.
At present there is no regulation for private investigators - anyone can set themselves up as a PI, even if they have a criminal record. The Home Affairs Select Committee in the House Of Commons is currently looking into Private Investigators and possible regulation of the industry.
All of our volunteers argued that tougher regulation is necessary to protect the public from having their most private information bought and sold.
