Police data breaches in Northern Ireland have given republican paramilitaries a powerful tool to intimidate, demoralise and target officers and their families for years to come, according to security experts.
The New IRA and other groups have gained the “upper hand” and will be able to use the unprecedented leaks of officers’ personal information to carry out psychological and possibly physical attacks, the analysts warned.
The scale and nature of the leaks could help dissident republicans identify and target Police Service of Northern Ireland personnel, said Richard English, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast and author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. “Information gathering is a vital part of terrorist planning, and that job just became potentially much easier,” he said.
The data breaches have already hurt police morale, said English. “Confidence among those working for the PSNI, and indeed wider confidence in the organisation, has been very seriously eroded.”
The force has apologised for “systemic” failures that led to the names, rank and departments of more than 10,000 officers and staff appearing briefly online on Tuesday. There was an earlier breach in July when a police-issue laptop and documents identifying 200 officers and staff were stolen from a private vehicle.
Simon Byrne, the chief constable, said dissident republicans have made an unverified claim to have obtained some data.
Whether that is true or not, the dissidents have gained leverage, said Dr Jonny Byrne, a criminology lecturer at Ulster University. “It only takes one individual to say they have this information, and this creates risk. We don’t know what’s real and what’s not.”
Police had to presume dissidents would obtain the data, said Dr Byrne. “Inevitably you have to believe they have it and have the potential to use it. So essentially they have the upper hand.”
Graffiti or messages naming police officers and their families can discourage recruitment, disrupt communities and trigger memories of the Troubles, even if the dissidents had limited capacity to launch attacks, said Dr Byrne.
“It’s smoke and mirrors. Just [for people] to assume you have something is enough to make threats and change behaviour and operational policing.”
Dissidents groups have staged sporadic attacks over the past decade, including shooting and wounding DCI John Caldwell in February. The groups are tiny, with uneven terrorist skillsets, and prone to infiltration by intelligence services. Drawing on pockets of support in Derry, Strabane and Belfast, their goal is to unsettle Northern Ireland and sustain a tradition of physical force republicanism dating from the 1916 rising.
“The PSNI remain a key target for the New and Continuity IRAs,” said Marisa McGlinchey, author of Unfinished Business: The Politics of ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicanism. “Any information that comes their way will be welcome, particularly if related to MI5.” If the groups obtain the data they will use it, said McGlinchey. “They will seize any opportunity they can against the PSNI.”
Officers and employees with sensitive jobs or unusual and easily traceable surnames are believed to be at special risk.
The son of a former police officer, whose property was fortified, said PSNI staff are likely to be offered a range of measures. “Panic buttons, motion sensors, cameras, bullet proof glass and devices which measure disruption to the magnetic field of the car will be offered to those who may not be able to relocate.”
Jay Nethercott, who served in the Ulster Defence Regiment, which was an IRA target during the Troubles, said the data breaches would help dissident republicans’ intimidation. “They’ll just keep playing the fear factor. Everyone worries about their family in this line of work.” Nethercott urged police officers to follow Troubles-era precautions. “Check your vehicle, stop your social life, your football, you golf – just like the old days.”
Dissident republicans claim to possess some of the information from the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s “industrial-scale” data breach, the chief constable says.
Simon Byrne told a press conference in Belfast on Thursday he was “deeply sorry” about the mishandling of personal information and that the force was advising officers and staff about potential threats and risks.
“You can only imagine the unconscionable horror as people start to realise that maybe a loved one is put in jeopardy by what they are seeing,” said Byrne.
The PSNI said systemic failures led to the mistaken release of details of more than 10,000 officers and staff on Tuesday – a spreadsheet was briefly published online – plus an earlier breach in July, when a police-issue laptop, radio and documents identifying more than 200 officers and staff were stolen from a private vehicle.
Hundreds of officers have raised safety concerns and expressed anxiety, with some “really, really angry”, said Byrne, speaking after an emergency meeting with the Policing Board of Northern Ireland, which oversees the force.
He rejected suggestions from Sammy Wilson, the Democratic Unionist party MP, among others, that he should resign. “Leadership is not about walking away – it’s facing up to responsibility. We need consistency and calm heads to lead us through an unprecedented crisis.”
Dissident republicans say they have some of the data circulating on WhatsApp, said Byrne, who emphasised the claim was unverified. “We are advising officers and staff about how to deal with that and any further risk that they face.”
A group set up to examine threats and risks has received more than 500 referrals. “We have not yet redeployed anybody, for example, from their home. We’re taking steps this afternoon to reassess in some cases, which I won’t go into for operational reasons, whether we need to redeploy some specialist officers away from the usual place of work to a new location.”
Dissident republicans have targeted police in sporadic gun and bomb attacks, including an ambush in February when masked gunmen seriously wounded DCI John Caldwell in Omagh, County Tyrone. In March, authorities raised the terrorism threat level from substantial to severe, meaning the chances of an attack are deemed highly likely.
Mark Durkan, a police board member, said it was unclear if dissidents did have the information but that the authorities must assume that was the case, and that attacks may follow.
The PSNI released an Excel spreadsheet containing details of more than 10,000 officers and employees in response to a freedom of information (FoI) request. It was published on an FoI website called WhatDoTheyKnow for about two and a half hours before being removed.
The surname and first initial of every employee, their rank or grade and department, including sensitive sections such as surveillance and intelligence, were included. Durkan queried why the PSNI had responded to the request within three working days. “I have never seen as quick a response from any agency to any FoI request, never mind one that has the potential to make public very sensitive information.”
Byrne, who cut short a family holiday to return to Northern Ireland, said the laptop and radio stolen from a vehicle in Newtownabbey would be of no use to thieves. “We have means of wiping those devices remotely so we are confident that information on them would not be accessible by a third party.”
Byrne said the PSNI needed to rebuild credibility – “for some people there is a breach of trust which is exploding out at the moment” – and brace for fines and compensation claims.
“We have to make some assumptions that we are liable to financial penalty, either from the regulator or from officers making a claim about the breach of their personal data.”
Junior doctors are starting a four-day walkout, with health bosses warning the NHS cannot take any more disruption.
The strike by members of the British Medical Association (BMA) starts at 07:00 BST and lasts until Tuesday.
It is the junior doctors' fifth strike in the pay dispute in England.
NHS Providers said services were at tipping point because covering the junior doctor strikes had cost an estimated £1bn, as well leading to thousands of postponed treatments.
Sir Julian Hartley, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospital bosses, said he was very worried about the severe disruption that would be seen during this latest strike and the two-day walkout by consultants planned later in August.
"We could be close to a tipping point," he said, adding: "Trusts and staff are pulling out all the stops but, with no end to strikes in sight, the sheer volume of planned treatment being put back due to industrial action will make it almost impossible for trusts to cut waiting lists as much as the government wants."
The £1bn cost has been accrued from lost productivity, preparing and planning for strikes and paying premium rates to consultants to provide cover.
Junior doctors, who make up nearly half the medical workforce, have been walking out of both emergency and planned care during their strikes.
During the strike, patients are advised to contact NHS 111 or the nearest pharmacy for more minor health concerns, although A&E departments remain open if needed.
People will be contacted if their appointment has to be rescheduled. GP and community appointments are unlikely to be affected.
The BMA has asked for a 35% pay rise to make up for what it says are 15 years of below-inflation wage rises.
The government gave junior doctors 6% plus £1,250, which works out at an average of nearly 9%.
Ministers have said there will be no more talks as that was the final settlement, pointing out they had agreed to pay what the independent pay review body had recommended.
So far, nearly 780,000 hospital appointments have had to be postponed because of strike action by NHS staff since December.
NHS England said that was a factor in the rising number of people waiting for treatment.
One patient who has been affected is Margaret Gotheridge, 81, from Nottingham, who needs her pacemaker replacing.
She had an appointment cancelled because of the consultants' strike in July and has another arranged for Monday during the junior doctors' strike.
Instead of taking the chance of it being cancelled she decided to pay for it to be done privately.
"I couldn't take the risk," she said, adding that she appreciated doctors had lost out on pay but described the 35% pay demand as "ridiculous".
Health Secretary Steve Barclay said: "Patients are bearing the brunt of the impact of continuous strikes across the NHS and further action by the BMA will cause more appointments and procedures to be postponed.
"My door is always open to discuss how to improve doctors' working lives but this pay award is final so I urge the BMA to end its strikes immediately."
BMA leader Prof Philip Banfield said blaming doctors for the rising waiting list was a "deliberate case of obfuscation".
He said: "The government was presiding over this problem long before any industrial action - waiting lists were steadily getting worse for the decade leading up to the pandemic arriving.
"In fact, it is these waiting lists - and doctors being unable to do their jobs because of underinvestment, workforce shortages and rota gaps - that lie behind the strikes they're being forced to take now."
He urged the government to get back to the negotiating table and put forward a "credible offer".
Police officers in Northern Ireland are frightened and their families and friends could be "jeopardised" after details were published in error, a former NI justice minister has said.
Naomi Long said some officers would consider their futures with the force.
In response to a freedom of information (FoI) request, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) shared names of all police and civilian personnel, where they were based and their roles.
The details were then published online.
They were removed a few hours later.
More than 300 police officers were murdered in Northern Ireland during the 30 years of violence known as the Troubles and officers and staff remain under threat from republican paramilitaries.
The most recent attack was in February when Det Ch Insp John Caldwell was seriously injured in a shooting in Omagh, County Tyrone.
The Police Federation for Northern Ireland called for an urgent inquiry.
Its chairman Liam Kelly told the BBC that his overriding emotions were of "dismay, shock and anger".
"The men and women I represent are appalled that this has happened and they're justifiably angry," he said.
"The trust from our officers is broken by this."
Mr Kelly added it was fortunate the PSNI spreadsheet had not given home addresses, saying that would have been a "potentially calamitous situation".
Pacemaker
Speaking to the BBC, Alliance Party leader Mrs Long said there would have to be a full and frank investigation into the circumstances of the breach, including why the data was available to be released in unencrypted form.
She added that the digital footprint would be almost impossible to eradicate and her focus was on making sure there was adequate support for officers based on the level of risk.
Mrs Long said the PSNI had a duty of care to ensure measures were put in place to offer officers proper guidance and additional security measures if necessary.
"These are people, both staff and officers, who put themselves at risk in order to keep the rest of us safe and the organisation has failed to protect their data and keep them safe," she added.
Threat faced by police
During the Troubles, 302 police officers were killed.
They currently face a threat from dissident republican groups who oppose the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement and remain committed to using violence to try to bring about a united Ireland.
In March, the terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland was raised from substantial to severe, meaning an attack was highly likely.
The threat to officers means they must be extremely vigilant about their security.
Many, especially from nationalist communities, keep their employment secret, in some cases even from many family members.
However much of the information in the breach is already in the public domain.
For example. uniformed officers wear badges with their names and ranks when on duty.
An emergency meeting of the Policing Board, which oversees the PSNI, will be held on Thursday morning.
Mike Nesbitt from the Ulster Unionist Party, who sits on the board, said there were more questions than answers and queried why there was no "fail safe" mechanism to prevent the information being uploaded.
He added that he was aware of a police officer who had not been able to eat a meal at their mother's home for 10 years due to the security risk posed to them.
Democratic Unionist Party policing board member Trevor Clarke said some officers had been forced into revealing their occupation to their families.
He described the data breach as a monumental error and said it would be a "long, arduous task"to get to the bottom of it.
Sinn Féin's justice spokesman Gerry Kelly, who also sits on the Policing Board, said the breach suggested systemic problems within the PSNI if "all of this information [is] in the once place and at the touch of a button".
The scale of this error is enormous.
It is probably the worst data breach in the organisation's 22-year history.
The consequences are a little more difficult to evaluate.
Had this contained addresses, it would have been catastrophic in terms of assisting terrorist groups target officers.
But the release of employee names could still expose individuals, many of whom take great care to keep who they work for a secret, even, in some cases, from friends and family.
That the information was published on a website for more than two hours will add to concerns within the workforce.
How did the breach happen?
The FoI from a member of the public asked the PSNI: "Could you provide the number of officers at each rank and number of staff at each grade?"
What they got back was not only a numerical table, but, by mistake, a huge Excel spreadsheet.
This was referred to by the police as "the source data" and should not have been released as part of the FoI.
Everything which was provided under the FoI, including the spreadsheet, was then published on an FoI website, What Do They Know, on Tuesday afternoon.
It was removed after two-and-a-half hours at the PSNI's request, once it became aware of it.
Each line contains multiple pieces of information from the top of the organisation down.
It includes the surname and first initial of every employee, their rank or grade, where they are based and the unit they work in, including sensitive areas such as surveillance and intelligence.
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Apologising to officers at a press conference on Tuesday evening, Assistant Chief Constable Chris Todd said the error was unacceptable.
"We operate in an environment, at the moment, where there is a severe threat to our colleagues from Northern Ireland-related terrorism and this is the last thing that anybody in the organisation wants to be hearing this evening," he said.
"I owe it to all of my colleagues to investigate this thoroughly and we've initiated that."
The chief constable, Simon Byrne, is on holiday but is being kept informed of developments.
Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said he was "deeply concerned" by the data breach and that senior PSNI officers were keeping him updated.
In just a matter of days, the 25th World Scout Jamboree in South Korea was crippled by a heatwave, looming typhoon, Covid outbreak and misconduct allegations.
Complaints were followed by accusations of lack of preparation by the organisers.
Described as the world's largest youth camp, the jamboree - or festival - gathers young Scouts from around the world every four years.
About 43,000 participants - mainly scouts aged 14-18 - gathered on 1 August for the 12-day event on South Korea's western coast.
But campsite problems led to contingents pulling out. On Monday, an incoming typhoon which turned into a tropical storm forced organisers to call quits and evacuate all participants from the Saemangeum area- a vast, treeless flatland.
Scout groups are now scattered at sites across the country, including hundreds of kilometres north in the capital Seoul.
But the jamboree's problems began long before the storm.
In the week preceding the event, heavy rainfall turned the campsite into a muddy swamp and breeding ground for mosquitoes and flies.
Days later, a heatwave shot temperatures up to 35C (95F) as the event began. About 400 cases of heat exhaustion were reported on the first night - with many people having to be treated at a makeshift hospital on the baking grounds. A Covid-19 outbreak also spread to about 70 campers.
The South Korean organising committee deployed additional medical staffers to the event, and provided more shade and air conditioners on site, but it wasn't enough, campers said.
Participants complained about poor sanitation, rotten food, a lack of shelter and privacy.
A man from the Thai delegation was caught walking into the female shower facility. He said it was an accident, and he had not seen a sign designating gender. After the incident, all 85 South Korean scouts and leaders withdrew from the jamboree, saying organisers did not do enough to protect women.
Reuters
By the end of the week, the UK and US contingents had pulled their thousands of scouts out of the campsite. They were followed by other countries including Singapore and New Zealand.
And on Tuesday, everyone else was evacuated from the Saemangeum site after South Korean authorities conceded it was no longer safe to run the event given the approaching storm.
Thousands of participants and volunteers were ferried out of the campsite in a convoy of more than 1,000 buses to other locations around South Korea. On Wednesday, one of the buses crashed, injuring three Swiss scout members who had to be taken to hospital.
The show must go on
Despite the evacuation from its main camp site, organisers say the jamboree, scheduled to continue to 12 August, will roll on with tours and education programmes in the new sites around the country where the scouts have been taken.
South Korea's culture ministry also announced on Tuesday that a closing ceremony will be held at the end of the week at the Seoul World Cup Stadium, along with a K-pop concert.
A spokesman from the New Zealand contingent told the BBC it had taken their team years to raise funds for the event, and the adult volunteers were "determined to make this a positive experience" despite the challenges.
But the post-event autopsy has already begun. Some critics before the event- including local politicians- raised concerns about gathering so many people at a site that lacked natural protection from the heat.
A senior South Korean official, who was called in to the site last week, told the BBC he believed a key reason for the mess was the number of authorities involved.
"We dispatched some workers to the site, and there were reports that they couldn't even have lunch. There were piles of lunch boxes prepared, but there was nobody to distribute it," he told the BBC. He declined to be named as he said he was not authorised to speak to media.
On top of the Korea Scout Association, the project was also managed by the province's officials, South Korea's legislature, as well as three other government agencies including the ministry of gender equality and family, the ministry of tourism, and the ministry of interior and safety.
Logistical stuff-ups persist, Korean media report. For example, officials in one district prepared food and accommodation for 175 evacuated scouts of the Yemen contingent. But it turned out the scouts had not even attended the jamboree in the first place.
"This is the first time in more than 100 years of World Scout Jamborees that we have had to face such compounded challenges, from untimely floods to an unprecedented heatwave and now a typhoon!" said Ahmad Alhendawi, the Secretary-General of the World Organization of the Scout Movement, in a statement.
Natural disasters- like the typhoon - are an unforeseen calamity. The last time a typhoon had disrupted the event was at the 1971 jamboree held in Japan, a spokesman from the Scouts told the BBC.
But South Korean authorities will also be sifting through accusations of mismanagement after six years of preparation.
The jamboree is a major event. Countries bid to host the festival each time, and in 2017, South Korea won that right.
Local authorities had hoped the first world jamboree to held since the pandemic would bring in investment and tourist dollars. It was to be seen as the country's largest undertaking in terms of international participants since the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
However, the event's troubles have instead led to Korean media calling the event "a national disgrace."
LONDON — Walking up a narrow gangplank, a small group of asylum seekers boarded the floating barge moored off England’s south coast. It would be their home for the foreseeable future.
Their arrival Monday was being closely monitored — and amplified — at the highest levels of the U.K. government.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, on holiday in California, posted a video claiming he was “ending the farce of illegal migrants being put in hotels by the taxpayer.” His Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick enthusiastically shared the rolling news images being played out on social media.
That only 15 migrants actually spent the night onboard the Bibby Stockholm on Monday didn’t seem to matter.
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Undocumented migration has become a red-hot topic for parts of the U.K. electorate, with rocketing numbers of migrants and asylum seekers attempting the dangerous crossing over the English Channel from France each year.
Britain’s shambolic processing systems have been unable to cope, and as the backlog of asylum cases grows longer more than 50,000 migrants are now housed in hotels around the country, awaiting a decision on their status.
This “luxurious hotel accommodation” has been “part of the pull” for criminals trafficking people to the U.K., Home Office minister Sarah Dines claimed in broadcast interviews Monday as she explained why the barge had been hired as an alternative. Housing people on the Bibby Stockholm sends “a forceful message that there will be proper accommodation, but not luxurious,” she added.
Yet even at its 500-strong capacity, the barge will house fewer than 1 percent of the 51,000 asylum seekers currently living in taxpayer-funded hotels around the country. Critics dismiss it as a stunt, demanding action instead to speed up asylum processing times which lag far behind those of France and Germany.
Nevertheless, Monday marked a symbolic moment for Sunak’s re-election campaign. The first Bibby Stockholm arrivals have been accompanied by rolling government announcements of other tough-sounding U.K. policies on undocumented migration, as part of an August PR blitz dubbed “Small Boats Week” by Cabinet aides.
Sunak, whose Conservatives are trailing the opposition Labour Party by a hefty 19 percentage points in opinion polls, hopes the voters he needs to keep him in No. 10 Downing Street are listening.
While tough migration policies are divisive across the British electorate as a whole, they are wildly popular among many of the crucial swing voters in Tory seats where Sunak is struggling to cling on.
The result of the next general election could be “blown wide open again” if Sunak can actually get small boats arrivals falling, said one former Conservative strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly because of his current role. “People aren’t convinced about Labour.”
People board the Bibby Stockholm immigration barge | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
A Tory MP in the so-called Red Wall of post-industrial seats which the Conservatives are battling to hold to described small boats arrivals as “the number one issue that comes up on doorsteps” in their area.
It’s for this reason Sunak has made ‘stopping the boats’ one of his core promises — a high-risk strategy given 3,790 people arrived in 91 small boats in the first quarter of this year alone, and with numbers traditionally soaring far higher over the summer months.
“The danger is that he has spent the past six months raising the salience of the issue, and still fails to deter the crossings — further reinforcing a public mood that it’s time to give Labour a shot,” said Luke Tryl, director of the consultancy More in Common, which holds regular focus groups in key seats around the country.
The ex-Tory strategist quoted above put it more bluntly. “If they don’t manage to get control of numbers [on small boats, and stubbornly high inflation] then I think the Labour Party is going to be fine just saying: ‘These guys don’t know what the fuck they are doing. We’re going to do all the same shit, we are just going to do it properly.’”
Taking off
Moving asylum seekers onto barges is just one of the raft of tough-sounding migration policies being pushed by Sunak since he took office last year, with an eye on an election in 2024.
His Illegal Migration Bill dominated the parliamentary agenda after being introduced in March, and became law just before MPs broke up for the summer recess. It paves the way for the British government to send people arriving in the U.K. without permission or a visa to the central African country of Rwanda to have their asylum claims processed.
Sunak will have to overcome significant legal challenges if he is ever to enact the policy, however. So far no flights to Rwanda have actually taken off.
Court of Appeal judges ruled in June that it was unlawful to send asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed. The U.K. government will take the case to the Supreme Court for a final ruling toward the end of this year.
Like the Bibby Stockholm barge, however, the Rwanda scheme is as much about symbolism as it is about practical solutions. Sunak and his hardline Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, want to send a message to would-be-migrants — and to British voters — that they are getting tough on this issue.
Aussie rules
That Sunak’s top election strategist Isaac Levido is an Australian — and a protégé of former Liberal Party strategist Lynton Crosby — has not gone unnoticed.
Levido played a key role in former Australian PM Scott Morrison’s unexpected election victory over Labor in 2019.
Obvious parallels have been drawn between Sunak’s small boats policy — drawn up under Levido’s guidance — and those of successive Australian Liberal Party leaders down the years.
Australian political strategist Isaac Levido | Leon Neal/Getty Images
One of them, Tony Abbott, deployed “Stop the Boats” as his own election-winning slogan in 2013, vowing to intercept migrant boats and either return them to where they traveled from, or take those on board to overseas island detention centers.
Kim Huynh, senior lecturer in politics at the Australian National University, said that campaign had been viewed as “non-nonsense” and had “cut through” in an election that was a “desperate affair.”
Huynh however noted the political landscape in Europe could be different to the Australian picture, given its “stronger human rights regime and norms.”
But Alexander Downer, a former leader of the Liberal Party and colleague of Abbott, and former Australian High Commissioner to London, said similar policies under John Howard’s Liberal-led governments of the 1990s and early 2000s had seen the trafficking of people into Australia fall away to “negligible levels.”
“That’s why the Rwanda solution is a really good solution. If they could pack all these people off to Rwanda then within weeks, not within months, people would stop coming across the Channel in small boats,” he said.
Labour trap
Unsurprisingly, the opposition U.K. Labour Party disagrees.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has variously branded the government’s Rwanda scheme ”unworkable,” “unethical” and “extortionately expensive.” Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock said he was “personally deeply unhappy” at the prospect of using vessels like the Bibby Stockholm.
But in terms of offering an alternative strategy, the U.K. Labour Party is less clear.
The party has a political tightrope to walk on the issue. More in Common polling in April showed public support for the Rwanda policy, with 46 per cent backing the government’s plans, with 27 per cent opposed.
Kinnock on Monday said his party would have “no choice” but to continue housing asylum seekers on barges and ex-military bases if it forms the next government.
Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, said that despite its deep misgivings, Labour will not allow a significant policy gap to open up with the Conservatives on the issue. After years of political chaos under Tory rule, the party wants the election to be fought on competence rather than policy differences.
Rather than than questioning if “we have a duty under international law to help these people fleeing persecution,” Labour is focusing on the Conservatives “being crap at getting rid of them and processing them,” Menon said.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has apologised for a self-inflicted security breach which has compromised the data of every serving officer and member of staff.
The service inadvertently published the information in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request on Tuesday.
The breach involved the surname, initials, the rank or grade, the work location and departments of all PSNI staff, but did not involve the officers' and civilians' private addresses.
It also reveals members of the organised crime unit, intelligence officers stationed at ports and airports, officers in the surveillance unit and almost 40 PSNI staff based at MI5's headquarters in Holywood, the Belfast Telegraph reports.
PSNI officers have been the targets of republican paramilitaries in recent years and in March the terror threat level in Northern Ireland was raised to severe.
PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Chris Todd apologised for the breach, saying: "I've had to inform the Information Commissioner's office of a significant data breach that we're responsible for.
"This is unacceptable."
He said it was a result of "human error" with the people involved in the process having "acted in good faith".
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'Human error' to blame for data breach
Mr Todd said the information was mistakenly made public for approximately two and a half to three hours after being published at 2.30pm on Tuesday afternoon.
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The data breach was brought to his attention at 4pm and was then taken down within the hour.
He added the leak was "regrettable" and that steps had been identified to avoid a similar error from happening again.
Data breach plays into hands of those who deem officers of the crown legitimate targets
It would be difficult to exaggerate the scale of what the Police Federation is calling a "monumental" data breach.
Northern Ireland is the one part of the UK where the terror threat level has been raised from substantial to severe, meaning attacks are highly likely.
That threat comes from dissident Irish republicans, the self-styled New IRA in particular, a conglomerate of breakaway factions still pursuing Irish unity by violent means.
The release of the names and ranks of an estimated 10,000 serving police officers and civilian staff plays right into the hands of those who deem officers of the crown legitimate targets.
Earlier this year, the New IRA claimed responsibility for a gun attack on Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell in Omagh – he was shot and seriously injured.
Police officers I've spoken to say they're required to implement rigorous data protection protocols and are furious their own data has been breached.
Chief Constable Simon Byrne is under pressure to cut short his holiday and return to Northern Ireland.
Given that the security of his officers and their families should be his top priority, he would be wise to do so.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has said he is "deeply concerned" about the breach.
Writing on X (formerly Twitter), he said: "My officials are in close contact with senior officers and are keeping me updated."
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Explaining how exactly the breach happened, Mr Todd said: "What's happened is we've received a Freedom of Information request, that's quite a routine inquiry, nothing untoward in that.
"We've responded to that request, which was seeking to understand the total numbers of officers and staff at all ranks and grade across the organisation, and in the response, unfortunately, one of our colleagues has embedded the source data, which informed that request.
"So, what was within that data was the surname, initial, the rank or grade, the location and the departments for each of our current employees across the police service."
When asked how useful the information would be to terrorist organisations, Mr Todd said the breach is of "significant concern" to many colleagues and information on how they can protect their own personal security has been passed down.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has been notified about the incident.
An ICO spokesperson said: "The Police Service of Northern Ireland has made us aware of an incident and we are assessing the information provided."
The Belfast Telegraph initially reported the breach, after the newspaper was made aware of the spreadsheet by the relative of a member of police staff.
It reported the spreadsheet had the response to the FOI about police staffing numbers in one tab - with the source information mistakenly included in another.
Liam Kelly, chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland (PFNI), described the security breach as "monumental".
He added: "Even if it was done accidentally, it still represents a data and security breach that should never have happened.
"Rigorous safeguards ought to have been in place to protect this valuable information which, if in the wrong hands, could do incalculable damage.
"The men and women I represent are appalled by this breach. They are shocked, dismayed and justifiably angry. Like me, they are demanding action to address this unprecedented disclosure of sensitive information.
"We have many colleagues who do everything possible to protect their police roles.
"We're fortunate that the PSNI spreadsheet didn't contain officer and staff home addresses, otherwise we would be facing a potentially calamitous situation."
The DUP's Policing Board representative, MLA Trevor Clarke, said the extent of the data breach in the PSNI is "unprecedented" and "deeply alarming".
He added: "The public will be rightly seeking answers and they deserve to see a robust response from the PSNI senior command."
The UUP representative on the Policing Board of Northern Ireland, MLA Mike Nesbitt, has called for an emergency meeting to discuss the breach, while Alliance leader Naomi Long MLA said it was of "profound concern".
