Dear Cabinet Office,

You are listed as a Data Controller of the government petition website and I have been told that the site is "run" by the Government Digital Service which is part of the Cabinet Office. I therefore hope that you will be able and willing to provide some technical information on who and how the underlying petition data can be accessed.

What I would like to know, and request in line with FOI legislation, is:

Please list in a spreadsheet all of the software systems that can access the data stored for the purposes of the petitions website, ideally as name and brief description.

Further, please provide in the spreadsheet:

1) column(s) to indicate whether these are command-line, GUI or API access points. If I have missed any other route to the data then please proactively include additional columns.

2) for each of these systems/routes please include a list of 'permissions sets' e.g. 'super-admin', 'user', 'editor', 'contractor', 'staff', 'public' - whatever your internal naming convention is.

3) for each of these permissions groups, please provide an indicator whether they can export email data in part or in full, where those emails have been submitted/stored for the purpose of petitioning the government.

4) Also, please provide numbers for how many people are registered for each permission set for each system.

In the hopes of adding clarity, this could look something like:

Name, Description, Access format, Permission set, Can export, Numbers permitted
MariaDB, primary db for main storage, Command-line, Admin, yes, 4
PHPMyAdmin, primary GUI for main storage, GUI, Admin, yes, 6,
PHPMyAdmin, primary GUI for main storage, GUI, Staffer, no, 12
Site API, url access point for petition site, API, public, no, 2500

Many thanks for your time taken in this matter.

Yours faithfully,

Dr Rob Davidson

Dear FOI Team Mailbox,

Many thanks for your response to my FOI request. Thank you also for providing part of the information requested.

Rather than proceed with an internal review to request again that information, I would appreciate more explanation on why it would either harm national security or prejudice investigation/detection of a crime (as per the two exemptions referenced in your reply) to provide the number of people with access to those software systems and permission sets.

Please can you provide further explanation for each exemption, specific to the data that has been requested? I believe it will help improve some further FOI submissions that I am working on.

Many thanks for your time taken in this matter.
Yours sincerely,

Robert Davidson

Dear Cabinet Office,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Cabinet Office's handling of my FOI request 'Government petitions systems information'.

I had been willing to accept the restriction of some information requested but had asked for further explanation of the exemptions used. I have had no response to this request and so I now wish an internal review to consider the exemptions invoked and to either over rule that position or provide full explanation as to why those exemptions are relevant in this case.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/g...

Yours faithfully,

Robert Davidson