DUBLIN — In normal societies, being publicly identified as a police officer is just part of the job. In Northern Ireland, despite a quarter century of relative peace, the disclosure could be a death sentence.
For that reason thousands of police officers are today agonizing over their futures after a monumental data blunder saw the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) accidentally publish the names and professional details — including, most sensitively, the base, unit and duties — of every single officer and civilian employee in the force.
The unprecedented breach — committed Tuesday, when the police force uploaded the wrong Excel spreadsheet to a Freedom of Information website — revealed details many officers had kept secret even from relatives and close friends.
Under enormous pressure after the scale of the leak became clear, PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne resisted calls to resign during a face-to-face grilling Thursday with the Policing Board, a cross-community panel that oversees police operations in a society still divided along British Protestant and Irish Catholic lines.
But within the ranks of Byrne’s shocked police force, serving officers rooted on both sides of that divide told POLITICO they have lost all faith in their commanders and politicians to protect them.
“I can’t get my head round the utter stupidity of what’s just happened. It goes against everything we’ve ever been told since day one about protecting ourselves and our families,” said a veteran policeman from an Irish nationalist background. He was granted anonymity, like all officers, to speak to POLITICO.
The officer today serves in one of the force’s 13 Tactical Support Groups (TSGs), well-armored units that specialize in confronting mobs and quelling riots. They often wear balaclavas when deployed to conceal their faces both from petrol bombs and from easy identification.
But since Tuesday anyone who copied the massive Excel file erroneously provided by the PSNI to the WhatDoTheyKnow website can identify every member of that officer’s Tactical Support Group with a single click.
Equally identifiable are more than 35 officers assigned to work alongside Britain’s anti-terrorist intelligence agency, MI5, at its top-security facility east of Belfast; the plainclothed officers involved in covert operations who typically operate in unmarked cars around Northern Ireland; the personal protection officers with guns tucked inside their blazers who silently shadow Northern Ireland’s top politicians and judges; and even the pilots of the force’s few surveillance aircraft.
All were identified by surname and initials and grouped by base, unit and responsibility within the Excel file.
The website had requested only broadbrush details of the force’s staffing levels by rank and grade, under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws — headline figures which did indeed appear on the top visible page of the spreadsheet.
But the FOI officer responsible evidently failed to notice the file also contained scores of data-rich tabs underneath, detailing more than 10,000 current and past employees from the chief constable down to lowly trainees.
WhatDoTheyKnow users who subscribed to notifications of new PSNI-tagged content instantly received automated emails Tuesday offering them a link to the Excel spreadsheet.
Once the PSNI was alerted — apparently by its own panicked employees — to the blunder, it emailed the website requesting the document’s urgent removal. This, however, only triggered an automatic email notification to the same subscribers noting the PSNI request, effectively branding it as data of interest to be downloaded quickly before it eventually disappeared, after nearly three hours online.
The document has since experienced what is known as the Streisand effect, where an effort to suppress a piece of information instead ensures it spreads like wildfire.
“I’ve never heard of WhatDoTheyKnow. But by that [Tuesday] night I had three colleagues, who don’t know each other, all independently sharing the document on different WhatsApp chats,” a second police officer told POLITICO. “None of us could believe what we were seeing. Terrorists would literally kill for this information, and we gave it away.”
Like many colleagues, she is already lawyering up and could sue the PSNI for — at the very least — compromising her right to privacy under U.K. data protection law.
This officer comes from a Protestant unionist background, and has been open with family and close friends about her job, confident that none would gossip or pass her details to a militant.
She still observes security practices common for cops in Northern Ireland, however. A personal protection firearm is always by her side in a concealed underarm holster; she checks for the presence of a booby-trap bomb beneath her private car before entering the vehicle; she never wears her uniform when going to and from work, and varies her routes daily; and above all, she never tells anyone who doesn’t already know that she’s “a peeler.”
“Whatever you say, say nothing,” she said, quoting Northern Ireland’s late Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
Security risks appear greater for the first officer quoted above. His father’s side of the family still believes he is a mundane civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs.
The officer has a common Irish surname, but with an unusual spelling that makes him quickly identifiable — thanks to the Excel document — as a riot squad officer.
“There’s not many dots left to connect,” he said. “The uncles on my father’s side are all republicans. They’d never be caught dead talking to police. Now they’ll know they’ve been talking to a policeman in their own home for years. I doubt I’ll be welcome in [his father’s home village] anymore.”
Of more immediate concern, he added, is the security of his two sons at their Catholic schools and a local Gaelic football club, where police and their children can face ostracism. He fears the boys may have to quit both school and club and, perhaps, the family move east into a predominantly Protestant community.
“I’m a nationalist, not a unionist, but it becomes impossible to live as a nationalist if you’re openly seen to be in the police,” he said. “I can accept danger to my own life. But my family has to be 100 percent protected from my work, and that’s no longer possible.”
The officer was unsure whether he is now a more likely target for the remnants of the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA), the vast majority of whose members have stuck to a 1997 ceasefire.
Crucially, the data table did not include other key personal details: home address, social media accounts, phone numbers or email, or vehicle license plates.
“Publishing my home address would have been game over. My resignation would already be submitted,” said the officer, who like the colleague quoted above is consulting a solicitor about possible legal action against his employer.
The officer is now weighing the relative incompetence of today’s IRA die-hards — they have killed only two police officers since the PSNI’s foundation in 2001 — against their worrying proximity. A leading figure in one notorious splinter group, the New IRA, is a neighbor of one of his uncles, and frequents the same pub.
The New IRA demonstrated its intent to kill police officers as recently as February, when a senior detective was ambushed while coaching his son’s soccer team. The detective was shot several times at close range but survived. Unlike most police officers, Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell often appeared in public — including to testify against paramilitary figures in court.
“I’ve never voluntarily put my head above the parapet, not in my own community, not while there’s still a viable threat from republican paramilitarism,” the officer quoted above said.
“The FOI unit has just put my head right up there on a plate for the bastards.”