BRITISH POLICE TO EXPAND COMPUTER BASE
The Home Secretary has unveiled the new police national computer PNC2 and has announced plans to expand the scope of computerized intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom. The move is criticized by civil liberties groups.
PNC2 will allow all police forces to have immediate access to a data base of about 5 million criminal names, 40 million vehicle owners, 135'000 wanted or missing people, and 450'000 missing vehicles.
People who are HIV positive on the criminal lists will have warnings with their names, as do potential escapers.
The Royal Ulster Constabulory is joining the network for the first time.
About 125'000 transactions a day can be performed on the computer, with an average response time of 2.5 seconds. The system, with hardware supplied by Siemens Nixdorf, and data solution supplied by Software AG, cost XX9c20 million.
Individual police forces are charged for use depending on their size.
Home secretary Baker hopes to see full computerization of national criminal records, a computer application for the new National Criminal Intelligence Unit to assist in dealing with serious crime, and a national system employing automatic fingerprint technology.
According to a Home office spokesman, it is not yet possible to say wether PNC2 will be compatible with European intelligence systems, as those have not yet been developed fully.
Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) has reservations about computerizing records.
According to Madeleine Colvin, a Liberty spokeswoman "there are no criteria for what information you are entitled to hold on the computer", no statutes have authorized it and the Data Protection Act is "totally inadequate" to deal with the new information being stored.
According to Liberty, there are 1160 listings on the computer's "extremist crime index".
Source: "The Guardian", 18.12.91