By Jim Bronskill, The Associated Press
OTTAWA (CP) -- A federal study has found strong support among front-line justice workers for including the names of people cleared of criminal charges alongside those of convicts in a new national super-computer.
But the idea is much less popular with wary members of the public, government research indicates.
Justice officials surveyed for the digital megaproject solidly backed inclusion of such diverse and sensitive data as iris scans, travel destinations of individuals and information about current criminal probes in the high-tech computer system to be shared by police and other security agencies.
The federal research will help officials determine what sort of files might eventually be called up by typing a few keystrokes into the planned Canada Public Safety Information Network.
“We need to survey the landscape and see what it tells us,” said Greg Wright, executive director of the Integrated Justice Information Secretatiat in the Public Safety Department. “This is all speculative since we’re not there yet.”
The computerized safety information system, an ambitious “network of networks” under construction for almost five years, will be used daily by the RCMP, Correctional Service, National Parole Board, Justice Department and Canada Border Services Agency.
Almost three-quarters of justice workers polled said they approved of placing the names of people who were charged with crimes, but never convicted, in the planned system of digital files.
The survey was conducted early last year by Ipsos-Reid for the Solicitor General’s Department, now known as Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. The results were recently made public.
The firm polled 309 police force members, federal prosecutors, corrections officials, federal and provincial parole board officials, employees of the federal immigration and customs agencies, and workers at the Canadian Police Information Centre, or CPIC.
CPIC has long been the key tool for Canadian police to run checks on suspects, vehicles, stolen property and urgent bulletins.
However, age caught up with the creaky computer system in the 1990s, prompting a major technological upgrade.
The revamped CPIC will be a central component of the initial version of the new Canada Public Safety Information Network, intended to improve information sharing among agencies and help them make quicker, better decisions.
The network will include criminal record histories and scanned fingerprint images, among other data. But officials are still pondering exactly what else should be added over time.
In response to the poll, 72 per cent of justice workers agreed with the idea of including “criminal charges of individuals who were not convicted.”
Sixty-seven per cent approved of adding “travel destinations of individuals” -- though it was not clear what sort of people might be covered.
The survey is considered accurate to within 5.8 percentage points 19 times out of 20.
In a poll conducted for the government a year earlier, members of the general public were more likely to be skeptical about filing certain records in the super-computer.
Forty-seven percent endorsed the idea of including criminal charges of people who were acquitted, and only 46 per cent supported listing travel destinations.
The polls also revealed differing attitudes on civil liberties.
Thirty-seven per cent of justice workers surveyed were concerned that information sharing between agencies might infringe privacy rights. A year earlier, 55 per cent of Canadians polled expressed concern about the infringement of rights.
Wright insisted privacy considerations were an important aspect of the network’s design.
The survey of justice workers also showed that 79 per cent felt there were problems sharing information in the criminal justice system. Of these, 69 per cent believed the problems limited their ability to do their job.
Fewer than one in three agreed the current justice information system was efficient.