Dear Home Office,

The Detention Services Order 04/2016 [1], which regulates internet access in immigration removal centres, pre-departure accommodation, and residential short-term holding facilities), formulates, in sections 13 and 18, responsibilities to log some information.

Section 13 states that "attempts to view, send or receive information related to prohibited harm related categories, sites or keywords/phrases is recorded and shared with the Compliance manager"

Section 18 states that "a monthly log of all website access requests, both granted and denied, [are submitted] to the Detention Services Order inbox (DSOConsultation at homeoffice.gov.uk) for collation. The combined log from all centres [is] sent to each centre’s internet administrator".

I want to request the following information:
- the monthly log described in section 18 from each centre/facility, for the years 2017-2020. If fulfilling this request would lead to a refusal under Section 12 of FOIA, I will accept the "combined logs" mentioned in the second sentence (I would assume they'll be easier to come by).
- a list of barred websites, broken down by centre/facility (the DSO does not require this information to be logged, but the FOI ref 51574 [2] showed that some amount of information is available).
- the weekly logs of attempts described in section 13 for each centre/facility, for the years 2017-2020. The dates for these logs are very secondary, so you can provide the aggregated logs that are the easiest to source (monthly, yearly, no time information). If fulfilling this request would lead to a refusal under Section 12 of FOIA, please only do the two first ones.

Yours faithfully,

Tom Bramson

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio...
[2]: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/b...

Dear DS FOI,

Thanks for your response to my request ref 58917 [1], I was not aware that the volume of information I was requesting was so large. I would like to change my request, in the hopes that you will be more able to fulfil it.

Section 18 of the DSO [2] states that "a monthly log of all website access requests, both granted and denied, [are submitted] to the Detention Services Order inbox (DSOConsultation at homeoffice.gov.uk) for collation. The combined log from all centres [is] sent to each centre’s internet administrator".

I would like to request:
- a list of barred websites, broken down by centre/facility (the DSO does not require this information to be logged, but the FOI ref 51574 [3] showed that some amount of information is available). Preferably, this should contain the list of all websites that have been banned at any time between 2017 and 2020, and not only those that are still banned today. This information can be aggregated in the way necessary to avoid a Section 12 refusal.

- an aggregated version of all website access requests that were denied in each centre/facility, as described in section 18 of the DSO, broken down by centre/facility, for the years 2017-2020. This information can be aggregated in the way necessary to avoid a Section 12 refusal.

If responding to both points will lead to a section 12 refusal, please only consider the first point.

Yours sincerely,

Tom Bramson

[1]: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/i...
[2]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio...
[3]: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/b...

Dear DS FOI,

Thanks so much for your response. May I ask however for an explanation regarding this data?

In my original request, I mentioned request 51574 from May 2018, which held information about attempts to access blocked sites in Dungavel, Gatwick, and Yarl's Wood.

As expected, I was able to observe some overlap between the data from request 51574 and the data you have communicated me for Gatwick and Yarl's Wood. However, there is no such overlap for Dungavel, even though Dungavel has 97 such documented attempts in 51574. Additionally, Dungavel only appears once in the data for 2017 and not at all in the data for 2018. This is unexpected, and makes me wonder whether some data in my current request was mistakenly misplaced (not only for Dungavel but for other IRCs as well)?

I also noticed that a small number of rows in the data you have disclosed contain a "Reason" column, where the decision for allowing or not access to the website is made explicit: would it be possible for you to include this column for all rows please?

Yours sincerely,

Tom Bramson