Have BT misled ICO?
There were a number of things in the report which left me believing that BT had misled ICO (and the public) with regards the covert trials. BT have repeatedly stated the trials involved no personally identifiable data and this is one of the points ICO touched on in their letter to one of the victims of the 2007 trials as reported on this web site last week. However, and this will be obvious to the technically minded although I have not seen anyone mention it to date, if we return to the table on page 45 we have a row called “IP addresses seen through the Proxy Servers” for the same period as above but also no data for 24th September due to a technical fault. So it is evident that the PageSense servers (running multiple instances of SQUID proxy server) were in possession of customer IPs; and in fact due to the way PageSense worked, they needed to have these IPs in order to forward the web page back to the user once it had been grabbed by SQUID. In fact they talk about this on page 14 of
