Category Archives: Law Enforcement IQ Trainwrecks

What’s in a number?

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From the ever vigilant The Register comes a story of a man who was detained by authorities for 50 days due to an error on the part of his ISP in identifying who had used a particular IP address to upload satirical images of a revered Indian (as in sub-continent, not Native American) leader of the 17th Century.

Details of the story can be found here

This is, to my mind, an IQ trainwreck as it caused a man to be deprived of his liberty for 50 days.

Also, the exact same information from ISPs is being used by law enforcement and Recording Rights groups to find terrorists and filesharers, so problems with the accuracy of the information will lead to wasted law enforcement efforts (terrorism) or defamation (Recording Rights groups accusing you of downloading when you didn’t).

Once the legal system becomes an ‘information consumer’ for this type of data then the standard of care and expectation of quality and accuracy must increase.

“Problems with the quality of the data” cause process traffic jam

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Hundreds of Irish motorists  (this author included) have technically driving uninsured because of delays with the National Car Test (the Irish equivalent of the UK MOT). This was reported by the Sunday Business Post on the 19th of August.

The Irish Road Safety Authority has confirmed that some motorists may not have been informed that their car was due its NCT. In Ireland you can’t insure your car with out a valid NCT certificate and not having an NCT certificate that verifies your vehicle’s roadworthiness could invalidate your insurance policy.

The root cause is identified by the company that operates the testing in Ireland as being “problems with the quality of the data” which resulted in them not getting details of all vehicles due for testing.

 Apparently the first that the company that adminsters the NCT knew of the problem was when people started to phone them asking them where their reminder letters where and seeking to make appointments.

The knock-on affect is that there is now a back log of a number of weeks for an appointment to get an NCT test. The Sunday Business Post refers to the testing centre in Donegal with a wait period of 6 weeks. My experience in the South East of Ireland has been a wait of over 2 months.

The NCT certificate on our car expired in July but due to my wife’s persistence on the phone we eventually got a test date in late August. I wonder if we would be insured if we were in a crash during that month?  Strictly speaking we would not have been as the vehicle would not have been certified as road-worthy.

In Ireland it is an offence to drive a vehicle that doesn’t have a valid NCT certificate. This offence carries with it a penalty of 5 ‘points’ on your drivers licence. 12 points results in your licence being taken away from you.  The impacts of this IQ Trainwreck were potentially significant.

CSI – won’t get fooled again?

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According to The Register the UK’s police forces have a bit of an IQ trainwreck with their police DNA database (like the one that they use on cop shows like CSI to absolutely identify the criminal with flashing lights and snazzy computer graphics -only slightly slower and less ‘rock and roll’ in the user interface department).

Apparently the interface between the DNA system and the Police National Computer was rejecting a large number (100,000 identified so far) of records due to a mismatch of key information.

The Register describes the root of the problem as follows:

Police DNA samples are identified and linked to both the DNA database and the PNC with two unique numbers. One of these is automatically printed on a label, along with a barcode, in a police officer’s DNA sampling kit. The other is the Arrest Summons Number, which a police officer writes by hand onto the sample label.

The samples are sent to the forensic service firms for processing, where both numbers are inputted into a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). This information is then emailed to the DNAD Unit, where another computer system automatically extracts the information and sticks it in a skeleton DNA record, which would have been created when a police officer took the original sample.

If the lab technician misread the police officer’s hand writing, there would be mismatch because both numbers need to match a corresponding record in the PNC in order for the DNA record to be loaded successfully.

This resulted in between 10% and 12% of records failing to load due to a mismatch in the data due to errors in transcription of handwritten information. To compound the problem it would seem that politics reared its ugly head as the Reg tells us that “poor co-operation” between the police forces, the DNA database unit and the forensic labs meant that the problem wasn’t tackled until a Data Quality and Integrity Team arrived on the scene to sort it out.

Of course, they sorted out for the police and forensic labs without them having to get their hands dirty. We hope that a forensic review of the root causes was put in place or else this problem will recur.

The key issues here from an IQ point of view are:

  1. Proofing processes against error – the hand-written serial number was a source of error in a process that has to be water tight. What could be done to address this?
  2. Failure of governance (or of a recognition that goverance was needed) to ensure good quality information for law enforcement purposes.
  3. Politics and what seems like ‘not our problem, its your data’ type cultures.
  4. Reliance on scrap and rework by an external agency (who appear now to be seen as the ‘saviours’ of the DNA database)

Poor quality information arises in a number of different ways. Often it is as inconvenient for you as the wrong price on a packet of peas in your supermarket. Other times it is the difference between a crime being solved or a criminal getting away.