British Columbia’s privacy commissioner is investigating the province’s abrupt decision to pull its public employee directory offline over cybersecurity and privacy concerns. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner confirmed Tuesday it is looking into the government’s decision to take down the long-published list of government employee names, titles and contact information. The office said in a statement that a team of investigators “will evaluate the validity” of the security risks that the NDP government cited in its decision to restrict access to the staff directory on Aug. 18. “Our public service must have a human face,” commissioner Michael Harvey said in a statement, while acknowledging that cybersecurity threats are “very real and must be taken seriously.” “We exist in a rapidly changing digital environment, where threat actors are increasingly targeting key individuals and public servants based on publicly available information,” Harvey said. “However, completely removing public access to the directory without a functional replacement is a very serious transparency issue, which contributes to an erosion in the public’s trust to our democratic institutions.” The commissioner’s office said it would report the findings of its investigation publicly, including any recommendations it has for government ministries to maintain both security and transparency in an increasingly perilous environment. RCMP prompted removal: Eby The B.C. Conservative caucus accused the New Democrat government of removing the public directory in an effort to hide a ballooning government bureaucracy. “A government running a record deficit doesn’t get to hide how many people are on the payroll,” B.C. Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay said in a statement last week. “British Columbians can’t hold government accountable for a bloated bureaucracy if they’re not even allowed to see it.” B.C. Premier David Eby says the government pulled down the list after security risks were identified by police. “The RCMP approached us, identified the serious risk that the information, which is the contact information for literally every government worker across the province, presented in an era of AI and phishing operations,” Eby said during an unrelated news conference Tuesday. The Ministry of Citizen’s Services was addressing those concerns when Eby says the security risk was made public. “We had to decide whether to leave the database up with all the information that the RCMP had told us was a serious risk, or whether to take it down and have a gap,” the premier said. “There was no good option here, but the decision was made to take the information down and to replace it as quickly as possible with a system that allows people to be in touch with government.” The province will fully co-operate with the privacy commissioner’s probe and will find a way to restore public access to government officials while protecting sensitive information, he said.
