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AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE UNDER INVESTIGATION OVER PRIVACY BREACH

Posted on March 12, 2012

The bungle at Townsville's Lavarack Barracks posted medical information, discipline records and psychology reports online for all to see. One former soldier has told ABC's 7.30 he was bullied and ostracised after his details were published, so much so that he attempted suicide.

Stephen Bell joined the Army in his father's footsteps and was based in Townsville, but things began to go wrong after a major mishap at a helicopter training course. During a simulation of a helicopter being submerged Private Bell was caught underwater and lost consciousness.

"A girl was next to me - somehow her seatbelt had came off over the side and gone around my head. Just kept being tighter and tighter and eventually it was too tight to move," he said.

"I tried to jump out, tried to take my harness off, get out, so now my arm was pinned so I couldn't move that and I had the seatbelt around my head still so I was hanging upside down under water.

"And they eventually raised the machine up ... and at the point when I came up to the top, I was passed out."

The incident sent Private Bell spiralling out of control; he had recurring dreams of drowning, struggled to meet his day-to-day work requirements and fell foul of his superiors.

"I noticed the dreams got worse and I just felt worse in general, like I'd start to feel tired all the time and I guess angrier than normal, irritable," he said. "I guess my work performance did suffer after that, it went downhill."

The incident, combined with other pre-existing personal matters, led to a diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

"I still see Stephen in him but he's not the same; he's anxious, depressed, all those sort of things," his father Ron Bell said.

Private Bell says the situation got worse when a colleague told him she had read sensitive personal information about him on a shared drive that "painted me as a bad person".

Intimate details

It wasn't just his details; screenshots reveal what appears to be a significant breach of privacy. Defence has confirmed that up to 80 soldiers were exposed; the documents include psychological reports, professional appraisals, and disciplinary records.

One file contains allegations of sexual abuse of a soldier's child, while a psychiatric report talks about a soldier's wife's miscarriage. Other personal files discuss hygiene issues, attitudes towards work, and marriage problems.

In Private Bell's case, his files revealed his own medical issues and disciplinary record, including assault and speeding charges - the sort of information he did not want his colleagues to see.

"I got called crazy based on the stuff about my post traumatic stress disorder," he said. "I guess I was painted as a wild cannon that could go off anytime, and yeah, it wasn't good."

Chris Puplick, former New South Wales privacy commissioner, says the incident is disappointing. "If the Department of Defence can't be trusted to keep secrets then there's something seriously wrong," he said. "From what I've seen I think it's a shocking breach - the fact that this sort of information is so easily accessible to people who have no reason and indeed no right to have that."

After finding and documenting the breach, Private Bell tried to have something done about it within Defence.

"I approached my sergeant first off and told him about this; that I didn't want my information on there, that I just want it private. He told me he wasn't an IT expert and neither was I." Private Bell's lowest point came when he was told he was to be discharged from the army, after which he attempted suicide.

"Things just built up to a point where that was it, for me, I just thought, I can't sleep, not getting better, all my family were in Brisbane, none in Townsville, and that was the last straw," he said.

After his discharge, Private Bell complained to the privacy commissioner. That investigation is underway. It is understood the information remained publically available for several months.

"I would hope that with a vigorous commissioner like Tim Pilgrim, that in fact if he finds this is a systemic problem within the Department of Defence, that in fact he will call them to account and require them to actually change their systems and undertake an audit of what has happened to far to find how many breaches there have been and what are the consequences of those breaches," Mr Puplick said.

Stephen Bell and his father say they just wants answers - for them and for the families of other soldiers who were exposed.

"The worst part is they probably don't even know it yet, so yeah, I think someone in the Defence Department has got some talking to do," Ron Bell said.

Defence says it rectified the problem within one day of being notified and it is cooperating with the privacy commission inquiry.

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