Security Fears Over Police Body Cameras

Three police forces have acknowledged security concerns over their storage of highly sensitive crime videos on computers owned by a private company.

The admissions follow a Sky News investigation into the use of body-worn police cameras sold by US firm Taser which connect to privately owned servers.

After cyber security experts told Sky News the safety of the system cannot be guaranteed, the Metropolitan Police said it planned to move quickly to using its own computers.

The force said that with plans to extend the use of body-worn cameras, it would store the data on UK servers and "move quickly" towards storing that data on police servers because "we believe this is the most cost effective and secure option".

West Yorkshire Police has said it will not use the commercial "cloud" system again and are seeking assurances from Taser that all their video has been deleted.

City of London Police now says it is "working to ensure that footage is retained and stored securely" from the Taser cameras that all their front line officers are due to be wearing by the end of the year.

Earlier, the Home Secretary was urged to take action, with shadow policing minister Jack Dromey saying he cannot be sure that videos of crimes and confrontations recorded by around 1,700 police body-worn cameras are safe.

"It is of the highest importance that that information remains confidential [and] we cannot be confident that that is the case at the moment," he said.

"We do not know where the information is stored, we don't know who can access that information and therefore I will be asking the Home Secretary to make a statement to parliament when parliament resumes. She needs to act to reassure the public."

Dr Helge Janicke, a cyber security expert at De Montfort University in Leicester, said police forces using the system had been forced to trust the server company.

"If you are the cloud provider you will have ultimately some access to that data and you can actually try to interrogate that," he said

"The people that are managing the data, that are holding the data, that are backing up the data, this is a part of the chain that you actually have to trust."

West Yorkshire Police's Assistant Chief Constable Andy Battle said the security of information is of "extreme importance" and Taser had agreed that previously recorded data would be deleted.

"We are now in the process of ensuring this has been removed from their databases. All future data will be stored locally on secure West Yorkshire Police servers," he said in a statement.

According to Taser, four British police forces are still using the cameras, with 1,000 at the Metropolitan Police, 400 being used by the British Transport Police, 200 at the City of London force and 25 in Staffordshire.

Taser says all the cameras are uploading videos to commercial server space they rent as part of a system it markets as Evidence.com.

The Metropolitan Police, which wrote to local community leaders last year assuring them its cameras' videos would be uploaded to its own servers, now admits they have been stored "in the European Union" but that the force complies with UK best practice.

Taser insists the servers it uses are more secure than internal police computers.

"Independent studies consistently show that cloud hosted systems are significantly more secure than home-grown on-premise systems across virtually every measurable security metric," said a spokesman.

"It's important to note that our customers are in full control of their data. Taser cannot delete a customer's data."

The Home Office said all police equipment must adhere to the requirements of the Data Protection Act.

Policing Minister Mike Penning told Sky News: "The operational usage, testing and procurement of police equipment is a matter for chief officers and police and crime commissioners."