Overlooked - Liberty

110 Overlooked: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain
proposals. When giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Home Affairs Committee on the
subject of Identity Cards, he described their introduction as a ‘very significant sea change in the
relationship between the state and every individual in the country’ 215 . Despite these interventions,
the capability of the ICO in regulating the public sector must be limited. Not only is it also a public
body but it has resource limitations. The ICO polices not only data protection but also the legal
freedom of information framework. The budgetary and resource restrictions under which the ICO
operates means its ability to police data protection is necessarily limited.
If the statutory framework and accountability is limited in its ability to temper privacy invasions, then
what reform other than a new single piece of legislation would be appropriate Liberty believes a
mix of targeted statutory reform, effective guidance, enhanced enforcement and improved
accountability should be at the heart of improved privacy protection within the United Kingdom.
Findings
Set out below are the main findings of this work. They cover both findings of fact (such as the growth
of the national DNA register) and findings of opinion (such as the implications of the growth of the
National DNA register). They cover both overarching points relevant to several of the specific areas
of study as well as the context-specific findings arising from each section.
General
1) Possibly the most significant sea change in the nature of information privacy is the blurring of a
distinction between historically distinct forms of surveillance. For example, targeted surveillance
has typically been interpreted as led by human intelligence against specific individuals or
organisations in the course of a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, mass surveillance arguably
was not surveillance in a strict sense in that it would not be targeted at any person but involved
the retention and dissemination of visual or information data in anticipation of use at a further
point. Mass surveillance also covered a wide range of activity covering public service access,
state benefit entitlement and so on.
Demarcation between previously separate forms of surveillance is blurring through the increasing
use of data matching and data mining. These activities typically involve automated trawling
though seemingly innocuous data to identify anomalous or potentially suspicious patterns. Data
matching and mining increasingly are being identified in departmental White Papers as an
effective and resource-efficient crime-detection tool. This is filtering through into legislation with
the Serious Crime Bill currently before Parliament making specific provision for data matching to
combat fraud. Consideration of moves towards data matching and mining should also make
reference to profiling. Profiling essentially involves the same data filtering techniques but as yet
has not been specifically proposed by the Government as a legitimate and proportionate crime
detection device. Profiling is concerned more with identifying information relating to an individual
than about details of income, benefits and so on. As a consequence, it is inherently more invasive
and touches on more sensitive subject matters such as ethnicity or religion. However, as has
been discussed, it is increasingly being referred to as a potentially justifiable method of data
filtering, particularly in response to national security concerns.
215
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/4060801.htm