Dissident republicans are claiming to be in possession of information that was leaked following a data blunder, Police Service of Northern Ireland chief constable Simon Byrne has said.
A spreadhseet identifying more than 10,000 people and containing the surname, first initial and employment details of every serving police officer and civilian member of staff was mistakenly published on a freedom of information website for several hours on Tuesday afternoon before it was removed.
It included some highly sensitive detail, including the 40 PSNI staff revealed to be based at MI5′s Northern Ireland headquarters in Holywood, Co Down, as well as the names of those who work in close protection and others whose unit was marked “secret”.
It later emerged on Wednesday afternoon that police are investigating a second data breach after a police issue laptop and radio were believed to have been stolen from a private vehicle in the Newtownabbey area on July 6th. The documents included a spreadsheet containing the names of over 200 serving officers and staff.
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Speaking to media after a meeting of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, Mr Byrne said he is “deeply sorry” over an “industrial scale breach of data”.
Mr Byrne said the priority “has to be remaining alert to the safety and welfare of both officers and staff as we deal with this unprecedented incident”.
He told the media: “I am deeply sorry about what has happened when we have seen an industrial scale breach of data that has gone into the public domain.
“We quickly established a critical incident command structure ... so that we can work flat out to get answers to the questions that are on everybody’s lips both within the organisations and beyond that.
“An early worst case scenario that we have been dealing with is that third parties would attempt to get this data to intimidate, corrupt or indeed cause harm to our officers and staff.
“We are now aware that dissident republicans claim to be in possession of some of this information circulating on WhatsApp, and as we speak we are advising officers and staff about how to deal with that and any further risk that they face.”
He said no police officers have been moved from their home.
He told a press conference: “One of the things we’ve done under the leadership is establish a group to look at real-time concerns about threat and risk.
“We’ve had over 500 referrals to that service, which is real-time triaging the level of risk that we perceive officers to be facing and then we’re offering them that advice.
“We have not yet redeployed anybody, for example, from their home, we’re taking steps this afternoon to reassess in some cases, which I won’t go into for operational reasons, whether we need to redeploy some specialist officers away from the usual place of work to a new location.”
Mr Byrne cut short his summer holiday to return to Belfast to attend the emergency meeting of the policing board.
The PSNI said that, as well as issuing updated personal security advice to those affected, an emergency threat assessment group had been established to look at welfare concerns. – Additional reporting PA
