Protection of Freedoms Bill
The Government today published their Protection of Freedoms Bill, which contains changes to regulation in various different areas.
Most relevant to education networks is the previously announced change (Part 2 Chapter 2) that will require Local Authorities to seek judicial approval for any notices issued or renewed under section 22 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. This appears to be a response to concern that these powers to obtain information about electronic communications were being used inappropriately. However the related policy of reducing other data access powers that may be available to Local Authorities does not seem to be in this Bill.
There also doesn't seem to be any mention of a reduction in the amount or duration of communications data that public networks are required to retain, though this was promised last year. It's possible that this may appear in another Bill.
There are also new provisions (part 6) under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FoIA) requiring public bodies to make "datasets" available in electronic form and with licences permitting re-use (at present information disclosed under FoIA is still subject to copyright, so the recipient may be prohibited from re-using it). I'm still trying to work out what would be covered by the apparently wide definition:
(5) In this Act “dataset” means information comprising a collection of information held in electronic form where all or most of the information in the collection—
(a) has been obtained or recorded for the purpose of providing a public authority with information in connection with the provision of a service by the authority or the carrying out of any other function of the authority,
(b) is factual information which—
(i) is not the product of analysis or interpretation other than calculation, and
(ii) is not an official statistic (within the meaning given by section 6(1) of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007), and
(c) remains presented in a way that (except for the purpose of forming part of the collection) has not been organised,
adapted or otherwise materially altered since it was obtained or recorded.
But as far as I can see the usual FoIA exemptions would still apply, for example to datasets that contain personal data (s.40), or whose disclosure would harm measures to prevent crime (s.31).
