Formal complaints lodged after airport security warning

Saturday 04 January 2020

A formal complaint has been made to the Data Protection Authority by a man who believes Guernsey Police used flight data to plan when to accost him as he passed through airport security.

David Piesing, a prominent businessman and regular critic of how slow Guernsey Airport's security process is, found himself confronted by a police officer when he was travelling on Thursday, warning him about the nature of his tweets.

He was taken aside by a plain-clothes police officer and given some 'advice' - to stop his criticisms. While a joint spokesperson issued by Law Enforcement and Guernsey Airport on Thursday afternoon attempted to clarify the situation by saying they did this because they found his tweets to present a security risk, Mr Piesing said he felt "deeply disturbed" by the involvement of police in a civil matter. 

Pictured: The States tried to clarify the matter with an initial statement, above, before issuing a more detailed statement HERE, claiming they wanted to ensure there was "no further security risk". 

A more detailed statement was then issued by Law Enforcement on Friday afternoon outlining why Mr Piesing's 'tweets' were treated as a security risk. You can read that statement in full by clicking HERE.  That statement confirmed that the decision was made to deploy a police officer to speak with Mr Piesing because of the security risk, not because of any issue relating to his right to free speech. 

Mr Piesing said his tweets criticising the tax-payer funded airport were all part of his right to free speech though, and he felt as though the police officer was being used to try and silence those criticisms.

But in addition, Mr Piesing said he feared the GDPR law had been broken, because how else could the police have known he would be going through security that morning? He says it would have been against the law for them to use flight data for something like this. 

Submitted to Chief of Police this evening, along with formal complaints to Data Protection Agency and to Simon Elliott, MD of STSB (Deputy Ferbrache cc’d) https://t.co/mLP83ESUEZ

— David Piesing (@DavidPiesing63) January 3, 2020

A spokesperson for the Office of the Data Protection Authority confirmed it has received a formal complaint. 

"The ODPA can confirm that a formal complaint has been received relating to the alleged processing of personal data by a number of Bailiwick controllers and is being dealt with in line with our statutory obligations. As a result, and in accordance with normal procedure, no further comment will be made at this time."

Mr Piesing also said on Twitter that he had made complaints to the Head of Law Enforcement, and the MD of STSB, the States body which manages the Ports. 

In the more detailed statement issued by Law Enforcement, a spokesperson said Mr Piesing was directed to engage with the police complaints process and "our officers will of course comply fully with any complaints process".

The spokesperson added that "because of the need to respect this complaints process, it is not possible to comment in further detail publicly at this stage".