ChristopherWhite.info

It’s the epitome of circular arguments. The Freedom of Information Act says we can have information. The Data Protection Act says we can’t. The FOI says we can have it because it’s in the public interest to release. The DP says it’s in the public interest to withold. The Information Comissioner, who I imagine (without justification, admittedly) to be a pretty conservative old chap not given to helping uppity students such as me, will have to arbitrate.

The BBC’s Newsnight team were working on a programme about religious extremism on university campuses. They put in FOI requests to a fistfull of UK universities, including Cardiff. Before they received an official response from Cardiff they had an email, sent in error, intended for another member of staff, asking whether to mention a certain incident. When the official response came back, they denied anything ever having happened.

Newsnight called me, as a man on the ground at Cardiff University, to see if I knew anything. I don’t - but I’d like to.

So Perri, the gair rhydd editor, and I put in a request of our own, and you can guess how that went.

What made us more suspicious was that the Students’ Union’s General Manager interrogated Perri a couple of days after our request was submitted, demanding to know why we’d put it in. What was that about “news is something someone else doesn’t want you to read”? Well, excuse me, but if there’s fundamentalists at Cardiff Uni I’d quite like to know about it, and I’m sure most of the other students would too. But apparently it’s a breach of the data protection principles, as it’s not a “fair” way to process the collected data.

The worst thing? How to get information out of people who really don’t want to give it to you isn’t something we’re taught. It’s probably not even something you can teach.