Information Commissioner rules Ofcom must share data
Cell site locations not a matter of national security
Posted in Mobile, 19th September 2006 15:14 GMT
See what The Register's experts have to say on application security
Comms regulator Ofcom is squaring up against fellow regulatocrats at the Information Commissioner's Office over just how much Britons should be allowed to know about their local cell phone base stations.
Sitefinder is a utility which enables concerned British locals to find out what cell phone base stations are nearby, and which companies run them as well as their frequencies and maximum output.
Anyone is welcome to come along and have a peek to see where cells are located, but if you wanted a list of all the cells with their longitude and latitude, perhaps for your latest Google Earth mashup, then you would have been out of luck.
Ofcom, which holds the data, felt there were national security implications, as well as public safety and intellectual property rights issues, in providing a searchable database of locations and capabilities.
It is imaginable that a terrorist might target a cellular base station, though the impact would be unlikely to justify the risk, but the impacts on public safety and intellectual properly rights are harder to fathom.
So, quite reasonably, the Information Commissioner has ruled that as the information is already freely available such arguments are – to coin a phrase - baseless.
Ofcom has 35 days to appeal, though it is hard to see where they would find grounds.®


The future of SaaS and IT infrastructure management
Solving on-premise email challenges with on-demand services
The business case for application security
Reducing messaging and web security costs with managed services

Win a Samsung C6625!
Is your cameraphone an oxymoron?
Reg Mobile and Wireless newsletter is go! go! go!
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter