British police used dead children's IDs

[Jenna]

The Guardian newspaper says that London's Metropolitan Police Service stole the identities of dozens of dead children to use as aliases for undercover officers, mining those children's personal histories to build covers and even issuing fake passports in their names.

Report: British Police Used Dead Children's IDs - ABC News

[Trojan 42]

Yes and why not? Seems a sensible course of action to me.

[Xiphos]

Probably a common practice among western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. So what?

I'm increasingly convinced society doesn't want us to do our jobs but expects us to magically protect them and prevent crime.

[pgg]

[Standard Dave]

Criminals also do this some fraudsters have made vast sums of money out of recreating the identity of a child born around a similar time as them who died as an infant.

[MacLean]

Probably a common practice among western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. So what?

I'm increasingly convinced society doesn't want us to do our jobs but expects us to magically protect them and prevent crime.

I'm cool with intelligence agencies doing it. I'm less fond of law enforcement agencies being intelligence agencies, but they do it different over there.

[Ducky]

Russell Nash (and whoever gets that reference without looking it up wins a billion internet points.)

[Xiphos]

Russell Nash (and whoever gets that reference without looking it up wins a billion internet points.)

There can be only one! Just watched that again last week.

[Motorwaycop]

And the problem is?

[Jks9199]

Russell Nash (and whoever gets that reference without looking it up wins a billion internet points.)

Am I too late to gain the prize?

[Xiphos]

Am I too late to gain the prize?

Seven and a half hours too late after my post.

[Odd]

I thought about this a bit yesterday, balancing the good&bad of it. Kept running up against it having two entirely different types of problems.

Is it moral? At a glance, sure, the child is dead and it's a million to one chance the family ever even knows - if they do, many would take pride from the memory of their child being used for good. It'd sure give the Miss Marples of the geological societies a thrill if the undercover identity actions showed up in their research.

Is it safe? That leads to the more critical problem, and where I find do find a grievance. It's increasingly bad spycraft. Now in the timeframe given, not so easily detected as today when it would be sending an agent out virtually under the cover of a bright blinking red arrow. The reason criminals still use it is their victims aren't paranoid and the criminals don't have access modify to the government databases these things are stored in now. If Ivan the Identity Thief could create a new entry he wouldn't crawl in dumpsters. Those government databases are accessible by...the government. No interference with family history by creating an identity out of whole cloth. Much harder to create a defensible identity with birth notices and such in the press. No trust-able way to lay an identity with press help. So it's easy to create (assuming all government agencies cooperate) a fake identity - but civilian supporting sources are lacking, and any cooperating are a risk.

It looks like people familiar with the matter came to similar conclusions decades ago. It's a bummer the journalist didn't address it better.

It was a process decision that first happened half a century ago without a scope to how it would look in the future, but they weren't protecting us, they were protecting people of that time. The journalist didn't cite any angry families, didn't say much of anything other than "this happened and everyone sucks for doing it" while sprinkling quotes. If that's the worst may the next generation judge us this gently.


Short version : Yeah, and?

Highlander TV series had hotter women. Just sayin...