Surveillance is ever-present
OUT-LAW Radio, 02/11/2006
Technology is helping to create a surveillance society, says the
Information Commissioner; we investigate how surveillance is ever
present, and how it is creating a divided society.
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly podcast that
keeps you up-to-date on all the twists and turns in the world of
technology law.
Every week we bring you the latest news and in-depth features
that help you to make sense of the ever-changing laws that govern
technology today.
My name is Matthew Magee, and coming up on this week's show we
hear about how we constant surveillance is creating a divided
society, and we talk to the man trying to use the Freedom of
Information Act to get information on the Freedom of Information
Act.
But first, the news.
- UK banks agree to data sharing; and
- Russian hacking case can be heard in England, says Judge
UK banks have agreed to Government data-sharing proposals on
suspected financial criminals, but say they want the public sector
to share its data too. The banks also express doubts about whether
the plan would actually help to catch criminals.
The British Bankers' Association outlines its views on the new
plans in a response to a recent Home Office consultation paper on
organised crime. It was critical of the Government's handling of
financial crime, and said that new measures would not even actually
increase convictions. "It is clearly disappointing that the
proposals in themselves, even if implemented fully, will not
necessarily lead to increased police and law enforcement
investigations and prosecutions," said the BBA.
A case claiming that two Russian companies hacked into a London
computer system can be heard in English Courts, a Judge has ruled.
Rusal, the third biggest aluminium producer in the World which owns
the two Russian companies involved, had argued that English Courts
had no jurisdiction.
"Ashton's computer server was in London," wrote Jonathan Hirst
QC, sitting as a Deputy Judge of the High Court, in his ruling.
That is where the confidential and privileged information was
stored. "The attack emanated from Russia but it was directed
at the server in London and that is where the hacking occurred", he
wrote.
That was this week's OUT-LAW News.
Two years ago information commissioner Richard Thomas warned
that Britons were sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Today
he will tell a conference of international privacy commissioners
that we have now woken up into that surveillance society.
He ordered a report into the current and future surveillance of
UK citizens and the findings are startling. Not only is the
Government collecting increasing amounts of information, it plans
to share more and more of it with the private sector. Half the UK
population has a Nectar loyalty card. From car number plate
recognition to computerised doctors' notes, we are tracked like
never before.
Assistant information commissioner Jonathan Bamford puts the
situation in the UK into perspective.
"We are the World capital in CCTV surveillance. We have lots of
initiatives on modernising Government. We have very powerful
retailers who hold lots of information about us. All sorts of
information there which all shows things about us and what we get
up to. It is important that we have a property base about how we
regulate that so we make sure that the public have confidence on
what goes on and are not mistrustful about it."
Collecting and sharing information is rife, says Bamford.
"It is a big business, the business of data aggregation in the
private sector, bringing together information on people's habits,
activities to sell commercially, to make available
commercially. With the public sector, we see an increase in
pressure for information sharing, the Government has its
transformational Government's agenda, the idea that if only public
authorities shared more information they would do better things for
the public. It would be what the public want. But to a certain
extent, that might well be right, but I think we have to be clear
on what the boundaries are in terms of data protection rules and in
terms of public acceptability."
The potential problems are serious, the implications
unsettling.
"I don't think we would all want to live in a situation where
every aspect of our private lives is available shall we say to the
Police. The fact that technology allows so much to happen now
shouldn't be the reason for doing it. You know as our medical
records are computerised, if ever there was a proposal which there
isn't thank goodness, to make all our medical records available for
the Police service or something like that, we would probably think
that was a step too far."
In fact, that kind of proposal hit the headlines just today.
Fears have been expressed that the NHS's new IT system could pass
medical records on to the police. Also in today's news was the
story that that one of the men who helped invent the UK'S DNA
database believes it has expanded too far and should not include
the records of innocent people. And two citizens' rights groups in
the US launched a campaign for web retailers to be investigated
over the extent of their tracking of consumers and how much people
know about it.
Data protection laws are there to protect us, but the
Surveillance Society Report details how the problems of
surveillance go far beyond immediate political and economic
concerns. The problem is spreading, and the social cost could be
huge.
"I think that at its highest level, if you are talking about
building up profiles on individuals, be it in the public or the
private sector, you are going to find there is an element of social
sorting going on where you actually see that some people become
favoured and others are treated with suspicion. You are going to
actually find there is a sort of digital divide there between
people. So you are going to actually get to the situation where the
way people live their lives and starts to influence how people
treat them in the future, you never have a blank slate."
The report outlines how new classes are created, how your
postcode or your family's criminal record will soon affect how
companies treat you, how long you wait on hold and even match you
with a call centre worker from a similar background. It will even
change the price of goods and services you receive. Add this to
government surveillance and you have a truly dystopian vision of
the immediate future.
"You could be the best behaved child in the class, but if the
profile that has been generated of you based on your relatives,
things like that, show you as being a risk of being disruptive or
being one of those 20% of people who commit 80% of the crime in
later life, you are going to be treated in a particular way by
whoever comes into contact with you however you are, and there is
worries there for the future about social stigmatisation, those
sorts of aspects, of social exclusion, and society of haves and
have nots".
Faced with this prospect, you would imagine the public would be
up in arms. In fact, says Bamford, they barely care.
"You would expect me to say now we are inundated with people
complaining about CCTV surveillance or what happens to those
images. That is not the case. What we find is it is much more the
minutiae of people's lives that are a concern to them. So the
fact that information is brought together by organisations from
different contexts and used to make decisions on whether to give
people goods or services or not. Often the public I don't think
value their information quite so much and I think that is starting
to change a little bit. People are waking up to the fact that
actually, their details are a valuable commodity and actually their
lives will be seriously messed up if those fall into the wrong
hands and are used in a way that they wouldn't want."
The report's vision is bleak, and Bamford says that it will take
more than just data protection officials to put the brakes on a
socially divisive surveillance society. The stakes, he says, are
high.
"I think we have to be very very careful about this. As I
say, we all will end up living lives which remove us from having
personal autonomy and deciding how we want to live our lives, and
actually have a life that is planned out for us by people who think
they know what their expectations of how we behave will be, and I
think that that is something which we need to be very very careful
about."
The Department of Constitutional Affairs is in charge of the
Freedom of Information Act, but one campaigner has had difficulty
extracting information from it.
The DCA commissioned a report by Frontier Economics which
analysed the cost of processing FOI requests. Based on that report,
the Government recommended controversial changes which could put
many FOI requests beyond the cost ceiling which allows Government
to refuse them.
Maurice Frankel of the campaign for Freedom of Information asked
for the data on which the report was based, but that request was
refused.
"We asked the DCA for the results of the one week survey they
carried out earlier at the beginning of the year. This is the date
that was given to Frontier Economics and forms a major part of the
data that they based their assessments on, and we have been refused
that data on the basis that it relates to the formulation of
Government policy and disclosure would not be in the public
interest. We now challenge that. You know the whole debate becomes
even more difficult if the Government is not prepared to release
the factual survey which forms the basis of the Frontier Economics
report."
Frankel says that the DCA may have broken its own guidance.
"What we have said is that we think the Government has
disregarded, or the DCA has disregarded its own advice to Whitehall
on the application of its exemption. Because the internal
guidance makes it clear that there has to be very clear grounds for
refusing factual information and it says that normally it will only
be justified to refuse it when the factual information is so
closely intertwined with the advice and discussion that they can't
be separated or the factual information itself reveals what the
option or what the discussion is. Which can't be the case here,
because this is a self-contained survey. And so you know it is very
unfortunate that the exercise has not been as transparent as it
should have been and that the DCA has refused FOI requests for the
data itself."
A spokeswoman for the DCA told OUT-LAW that the decision was
under internal review, and that the request had been refused
because the decision on FOI charging had not been made yet, so the
data was still being used in its deliberations.
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening.
Why not get in touch with OUT-LAW Radio? Do you have a legal
problem you would like us to discuss on air? Do you know of a
technology law story? We'd love to hear from you on radio@out-law.com.
Make sure you tune in next week; for now, goodbye.
OUT-LAW Radio was produced and presented by Matthew
Magee for international law firm Pinsent Masons.
