David Cameron has accused Labour of creating a “control state” and vowed a Tory government would hand power back to voters with a new “right to data”.

In a speech, the Tory leader set out plans to give voters access to information in 20 key areas.

These would include crime statistics, the performance of schools and hospitals and road traffic data.

Source: BBC News

The Ministry of Defence is trying to block all internet access to the whistleblowing site Wikileaks from thousands of its own computers after discovering that dissidents have been using it to leak copies of British military manuals.

Newly obtained MoD emails reveal alarm over the discovery that Wikileaks is freely publishing manuals that are used by patrols in Iraq.

One email says: “There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands. Not just UK MoD but other places as well. Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was ‘restricted’ … It is huge.”

Source: guardian.co.uk

Ordnance Survey responded to our FOI request for publication of its study into itself and the best financial organisation for itself.

And in these times when MPs’ expenses are redacted, of course OS isn’t going to let us see everything.

That’s why the document, which I’ve uploaded as a PDF (though it’s originally a TIFF – apparently a scan of the paper document once the black marker pen had been wielded), is full of lacunae.

Source: Free Our Data

Shadow health minister Stephen O’Brien has said the recently published Gateway Reviews of NHS IT throw doubts on the Office of Government Commerce’s ability to scrutinise

The 31 reviews of the NHS National Programme for IT, published by the OGC after a Freedom of Information request, included nine with red ratings, indicating the relevant projects required immediate action to achieve success.

Source: Kable
Hat tip: Glyn

The information commissioner has ordered the opening of confidential files on a wide range of high-risk IT projects, including the ID cards scheme, joined up police intelligence systems and the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT). It is the most far-reaching decision under the Freedom of Information Act for government IT.

Source: Computer Weekly

Scotland’s information commissioner has criticised “disingenuous” MPs over the withholding of details from their published expenses.

Kevin Dunion said he was concerned that blame for the level of blacked-out information on the claims had been laid with the House of Commons authorities.

…

Mr Dunion told BBC Scotland’s Politics Show that some of the details which were witheld, or redacted, would have been disclosed under the Scottish Parliament system.

Source: BBC News

Yesterday’s publication makes it abundantly clear that many of the most damaging revelations might never have been exposed if the House of Commons had been able to stick to its own plan for releasing members’ claims. Perhaps most starkly, the practice of “flipping” between different second homes for the purposes of claiming additional costs allowance, employed by Alistair Darling and others, is impossible to spot in Parliament’s version of the documents because all the addresses have been blacked out

Source: Times Online

Public bodies should automatically release all information that does not need to stay secret, the information commissioner is expected to argue.

Richard Thomas, who is stepping down, will say all but the “crown jewels” should be released without waiting for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Source: BBC News

The government is planning to introduce important new restrictions on access to cabinet and royal papers under freedom of information.

Under the new plans, cabinet papers would be absolutely exempt from FOI for a period of 20 years. This would include records relating to cabinet sub-committees.

This would be significantly tighter than the current position

Source: BBC

FOI legislation says that public bodies must give people the information they ask for in an official request. They are allowed, though, to refuse the request once it has become too costly based on a formula of man hours used to find the information. Currently, an organisation can refuse a request if it estimates that it will take more than 18 hours to fulfil.

The Information Tribunal has now said that an organisation which uses up those hours based on a misunderstanding of the original request can legitimately count them towards the total used as the basis of a refusal.

Source: The Register