Tuesday on the Northern Ireland Police website they were posted by mistake the personal data of all its approximately ten thousand agents. The data was available to anyone for about two hours: once some agents realized the mistake, the data was removed. The police themselves though he defined their publication “an error of monumental dimensions”, which could cause “incalculable damage”.
The Northern Ireland police have for years guaranteed a very high degree of security to their officers, to protect them from possible retaliation and terrorist attacks by armed groups. In the years of the civil war, which ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Accords, Northern Irish police officers were often attacked by nationalist and republican groups, including the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which fought for Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and join Ireland.
In one sense the civil war never quite ended, in the sense that even after the Good Friday Agreements violence between opposing groups continued, as did that against Northern Irish policemen. As late as February 2023, a prominent Northern Irish police officer, John Caldwell, had been attacked by two men who had fired several shots, seriously wounding him. For security reasons many policemen do not like to talk about their job, and sometimes even hide it from their friends and to his own familyespecially if they come from a background with a Republican majority.
Agents’ personal data is usually handled with extreme caution, but it seems that human error was behind Tuesday’s publication: an agent was responding to a request for access to the documents asking about the police hierarchy. By mistake, the answer published on the site contained the file where the person who answered had found the information: a database that contains, among other things, the surnames and the initial letter of all the agents, their rank and the unit to which refer to everything from Chief Constable Simon Byrne down to the lowest-ranking officers.
According to Belfast Telegraph The list also contained highly classified information to which very few people typically have access, such as the composition of organized crime units and the surnames of police officers seconded to the British Intelligence Service based in Holywood on the Belfast outskirts. The list contained no private addresses, but if it fell into the hands of republican armed groups it would provide them with a huge amount of information for potential attacks.
«We are talking about probably the worst security breach in the history of the Irish police, which was born 22 years ago», he wrote are BBC News journalist Julian O’Neill, covering Northern Ireland. “If private addresses had also been included in the list, it would have been a catastrophe, it would have actually made it easier for terrorist groups to target agents.”
An emergency meeting of the committee that oversees the Northern Irish police force, which includes members of the Northern Irish parliament and several independent experts, is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting on Thursday.