The Electoral Commission has no central point of data control

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Tuesday 18 May 2010 at 17:34:00

Neither does it have any way of checking up on staff activity, according to
an FOI request

In response to a Freedom Of Information (FOI) request, The Electoral
Commission has admitted that it has no central point of control of electoral
data.

The Commission explained that rather than collating the registers into a
single database, the information is managed by local authorities themselves. The
commission is sent secure updates on a monthly basis by each local authority.

A considerable 25 staff have access to the electoral registers in the party
and election finance team, along with eight members of IT who control access
permissions.

The FOI request was submitted by Guy Churchward, CEO at security specialist
Loglogic, who says that the lack of a central point of control is potentially a
problem because there are more points of access.

He also argues that although staff access to electoral registers is limited,
with a number of procedures and policies in place, no one checks that these are
being followed.

?Privileged users are not being electronically monitored regarding their
activities on the registers. [The Electoral Commission] does not have automated
systems in place to monitor the activities of users; they therefore don?t have
any way of generating real-time security alerts.?

He added: ?The need to monitor the digital footprint of employees to preserve
the confidentiality and integrity of data and monitor privileged user activity
is extremely important ? especially with regards to public sector information.

?It?s very disappointing. I?m hoping that each local authority is a little
sharper and that they are electronically managing and monitoring access to their
databases ? it?s certainly something we should be asking our councils about,? he
added.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2263252/electoral-commission-central