Overlooked - Liberty

Overlooked: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain 17
principle these powers are intended for use in order to uncover some from of ‘wrongdoing’, even if
this is a regulatory matter not coming within the scope of the full criminal law.
Recently there has been a tendency to combine mass and targeted surveillance techniques through
‘data mining’ or ‘profiling’. These are the means by which innocuous mass data is processed to
allow an indication of characteristics or tendencies that might be used to justify some further and
more intrusive step such as targeted surveillance, investigation or use of search powers. Following
the alleged attempted attacks on planes leaving UK airports in August 2006 there was debate about
the extent to which racial and religious profiling of passengers might be justified in order to allow
more rigorous searches of passengers and luggage. Similarly, following the July 2005 bombings
there was debate about particular targeting of ethnic groups on the London Underground and
elsewhere. Ian Johnston, Chief Constable of British Transport Police, attracted attention with his
comments that his officers would not be searching “little old white ladies”. Meanwhile following the
alleged attempted hijacking of aeroplanes from British airports in the summer of 2006 the former
Metropolitan Police Chief Sir John Stevens suggested that much greater use of passenger profiling
would assist security. This caused concern among Muslim groups in groups in particular while
Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei said that this would effectively create an offence
of “travelling whilst Asian”. However so far there have no been specific formal developments towards
anything that could be described as ‘racial profiling’ 25 .
There is no simple dividing line between profiling and intelligence led identification. To an extent,
some form of profiling will take place as a matter of course in the activities of the police and other
agents such as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC; formerly Customs and Excise). For
example, it is likely that HMRC will pay particular attention to passengers who fit the common
demographic of a ‘drug mule’ travelling from locations identified as drug importation routes . To use
this demographic as the sole basis for stopping someone would effectively amount to profiling. To
take into account other indicators, such as behaviour or mannerisms consistent with trafficking
drugs, is arguably intelligence-led identification.
The line between profiling and intelligence-led identification can be blurred when profiling individuals.
However, mining of data to identify, is increasingly based on totally automated systems. An example
of data mining would be the computerised analysis of innocuous information to see if it produces
any anomalies that might indicate some sort of criminality. The July 2006 Home Office white paper
‘New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime’ (Cm 6875) proposed wide scale use of data
mining and an idea of the ways in which trials had taken place and how data mining might be used
in the future.
“A good example of the sort of ‘profiling’ work we would like to see more of is an
exercise carried out a few years ago by HM Customs and Excise. Parallel checks
were made on VAT and excise databases with information from the licensing trade
and information on building dimensions from Land Registry. This exercise outlined
a number of businesses which were submitting records which all looked reasonable
enough in their own terms, but when put together came up with a picture which
was highly suspicious. In a large number of cases, turnover was being reported
25
Although as the section on ID cards points out later, profiling of some type might eventually prove to be an
inevitable consequence of the creation of the NIR