What Price now report

Whilst looking through Operation Motorman I found a request asking for the “What price privacy report”. For those of you that have not read my post on Operation Motorman, have a little read right now.  To go over it for those of you that did, it was about an Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) report into phone hacking and privacy breaches. The issue was that there was one request asking for the “What Price Privacy Report”.  At the time it was denied by the ICO because the request was way to big. So I decided to have a go and see if I could get it.

I try and do this for other because they have inspired me, and because it teaches me who to write better requests.  It shows me what I need to ask for the next time.  By refining other people's requests I get to see what they have done and learn from it. TO be honest I was a bit lazy on this one in that I just copied and pasted most of the request (The one that I am doing on Argentinian incursions is totally my own…  Stay tuned for this one people).

Here is the original and here is mine. In the original they asked for four different things.  So I decided that I would ask for two, thinking that this would half the amount of work needed AND since they were both asking for documents (Prosecutions and the blaggers manual) this would have been easier to get hold of. Wrong!

The response that I got back was rather more interesting than that.  In the first part they stated that it had been copied from another request (Which as stated is completely true). This REALLY surprised me (they even gave the link) as I would have not thought that they would keep this or have a way to identify this after five years. This was the section that I loved:

We can see from the WDTK website that you are aware of this previous request and have therefore concluded that your intention must be to submit the same request to us again. We have consequently interpreted your request in the same way as we did the previous request received in 2011.

For those of you that are eagle eyed will notice that on the original request I left a little note for me to remember which one to look for. They must have gone on the website and seen this.  Jeepers!  

So nothing new gained other than a bit of a slapped wrist.  Or is it?  It shows that these bodies do keep a record of their requests AND keep checking the responses (I once had an email for North Wales Police asking me to update the status of a request because I had incorrectly assigned it).  It also shows that they are as interesting in what we do this information and what we are asking.  It also shows that Jonathan is a bit of a lazy boy every now and then.