Alex Owen was the senior investigating officer with the Information Commissioner’s office in Winslow between 1999 and 2005. Aged 19 he joined the police force, working in various roles before retiring at the rank of detective inspector in 1995. In 1997 he joined the Protection Registrar’s Office (later the ICO) as an investigator, before becoming senior investigating officer in 1999.When giving his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry (30 Nov), Owen talks about obtaining his own personal working copy of the Operation Motorman database and the ICO’s refusal to pursue newspapers over the illegal purchase of confidential information.The main points of Owens’s evidence are listed below. For a full transcript of his oral evidence click here. For his full written evidence click here and for supplemental statement here.On now associating Glen Mulcaire’s arrest in August 2006 with Operation Motorman:“Basically, at the time one of the burning questions was, especially for the ex-directory mobile phone numbers, what could all these journalists want it for? You're talking about thousands and thousands of telephone ex-directory numbers. And essentially I -- well, I can say, an awful lot of the names of the victims that are coming up in hacking are in Operation Motorman, Steve Whittamore's books. An awful lot. And my personal feeling was Steve Whittamore was gathering the numbers -- he wasn't hacking, he was definitely not into hacking, we found no evidence of that. But he was then passing them to the papers and possibly those numbers were being passed to people who hacked. I mean the names of people like Milly Dowler, the numbers,ex-directory numbers, that sort of thing, and it wasn't just an occasional one. There were dozens of them, of the names that have now come out in the hacking Inquiry.”On his own personal working copy of the Operation Motorman database:Q. Can I ask you what analysis if any that you carried out, and this was an analysis you undertook, it must have started in April of this year?“Yes. Bearing in mind I'm not an expert in drawing up tables and analysis, I did it in the simplistic way. Obviously the overall figure published in "What price privacy now?" was something like, off the top of my head, 3,500 or 3,700. In my total, there was 17,000, 17,500. And then when you look at the individual papers on the league table, obviously the easiest one is to start at the bottom, the Sunday World. One reporter and one request to Whittamore. You only have to type in Sunday World and up comes the name of that reporter. And you tap in his name and I found 24 requests that that one reporter had made of Whittamore. And they were criminal records and vehicle numbers. They weren't just all connected to one person. Not like sort of 24 requests in relation to one individual. There may have been a couple of requests related to one individual, but I didn't count how many individuals, but there's got to be four or five.”On Operation Motorman material:Q. I should ask this question: did you see reference to the Dowlers' ex-directory numbers in the Operation Motorman material?“Yes.”On the focus of Operation Motorman:Q. So in terms of the continuing progress of Operation Motorman, the focus was on those as it were lower down the chain?“Well, yes. Basically they'd drawn a red line and with the press and the reporters above that line and we dealt with anything below that line.”On his conversation with Nick Davies of the Guardian in 2009:“Basically, it was when he revealed -- or when the – it was right after the Gordon Taylor story broke, that there were more, it wasn't just Clive Goodman and his lone rogue reporter. It was then it dawned on me this is what they wanted the numbers for: to hack. And at the time I think Nick was -- Nick Davies was trying to get some support, somebody to believe him, some sort of concrete evidence to continue his campaign, and I thought if he saw this, it would highlight how many victims there were in Operation Motorman, and one detective -- or hacker wouldn't do five or six numbers, and the purpose was to give him some strength behind his own campaign and at the same time let the people out there who'd been victims in Operation Motorman know they'd been victims, because we'd only seen 60 or 70 and been able to tell them. There were still 4, 5, 6,000. I've obviously never counted them. So it was a twofold.”On the response of his bosses to the revelations:Q. What was the reaction, if any, from Mr Aldhouse to Mr Thomas in response to these revelations?“Well, it was at the end, I basically said what we have here, if we haven't got any public defence we can go for everybody, from the blagger right up to the newspaper, at which point there was a look of horror on Mr Aldhouse's face and he said, "We can't take them on, they're too big for us", and Mr Thomas just sort of bemused, deep in thought, just said, "Fine, thanks very much, Alex, pass my compliments on and congratulations to the team for me, job well done." And that was basically it.”On being informed by his immediate line manager, Jean Lockett, that he was not to make contact with any of the newspapers identified:"You're not to go near the press, you're not to make any approach to any reporters or the press". At first I looked at her and said, "Jean, you are joking?" and she said, "No", and I could see on her face she wasn't joking, and I said, "Why?" She said, "Oh, Richard's dealing with it now, he's doing it through the Press Complaints Council". I suppose I was out of order, I wanted to argue with her, and I could see on her face it was a case of "Please don't shoot the messenger".Q. What that says is, and I'll read is it out, because you know what it says but some people listening to me might not, and I quote verbatim from the report: "This was a great disappointment to the ICO" – the "this" was the discontinuance of the criminal proceedings for conspiracy -- "especially as it seemed to underplay the seriousness of Section 55 offences. It also meant that it was not in the public interest to proceed with the ICO's own prosecutions, nor could the Information Commissioner contemplate putting prosecutions against the journalists or others to whom confidential information had been supplied."On his reaction to seeing the first report from the Information Commissioner, “What price privacy?”:Q. Someone had tipped you off to look at that, perhaps for a reason, but what was your reaction when you saw it?“It may be correct in relation to the others, you know, the blaggers and the thing, but you could never go back after three years and contemplate prosecuting journalists. They'd never even been investigated. And I -- there's enough legal people here to know if I -- I kept evidence -- you can't put -- if you have a conspiracy, you can't put five people on the back-burner and wait and see how you got on with the same five people in the front that's getting prosecuted, because you got a good result, right, we'll go and prosecute them as well. Well, they're all part of one conspiracy. You either investigate them all, or those five you have to say we're not going to investigate them which means we're not going to prosecute them. I don't know whether that would be -- is the correct word abuse of the justice system?”“In the police force, that would never ever happen. You either decide they all get investigated or -- I mean, it's fine to investigate them and find those five there's insufficient evidence and then throw them out, but you can't just -- well, I said it, you can't do it, it's impossible.”