Waking up to a surveillance society

The Information Commissioner's Office published in November 2006 'A Surveillance Society' - a detailed report which has been specially commissioned for the conference. It looks at surveillance in 2006 and projects forward ten years to 2016. It describes a surveillance society as one where technology is extensively and routinely used to track and record our activities and movements. This includes systematic tracking and recording of travel and use of public services, automated use of CCTV, analysis of buying habits and financial transactions, and the work-place monitoring of telephone calls, email and internet use. This can often be in ways which are invisible or not obvious to ordinary individuals as they are watched and monitored, and the report shows how pervasive surveillance looks set to accelerate in the years to come.

The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas said, "Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. Surveillance activities can be well-intentioned and bring benefits. They may be necessary or desirable - for example to fight terrorism and serious crime, to improve entitlement and access to public and private services, and to improve healthcare. But unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance can foster a climate of suspicion and undermine trust. As ever-more information is collected, shared and used, it intrudes into our private space and leads to decisions which directly influence people's lives. Mistakes can also easily be made with serious consequences - false matches and other cases of mistaken identity, inaccurate facts or inferences, suspicions taken as reality, and breaches of security. I am keen to start a debate about where the lines should be drawn. What is acceptable and what is not?"

The report provides a balanced view of the monitored world in which we live. It argues that much of the surveillance in place is a result of well meaning intentions which become operationally skewed and suffer from function creep. But the report includes concerns about implicit lack of trust in society stating that, "Most profoundly, all of today's surveillance processes and practices bespeak a world where we know we're not really trusted. Surveillance fosters suspicion.4 The employer who installs keystroke monitors at workstations, or GPS devices in service vehicles is saying that they do not trust their employees. The welfare benefits administrator who seeks evidence of double-dipping or solicits tip-offs on a possible 'spouse-in-the-house' is saying they do not trust their clients. And when parents start to use webcams and GPS systems to check on their teenagers' activities, they are saying they don't trust them either. Some of this, you object, may seem like simple prudence. But how far can this go? Social relationships depend on trust and permitting ourselves to undermine it in this way seems like slow social suicide."

According to the report, "Everyday encounters with surveillance include:

A balance has to be struck between the legitimate need to undertake surveillance and the desire of us all to live our lives unhindered and unrecorded. It would seem that currently there is an imbalance for, as the report explains, we are all subjected to social sorting in order to define target markets and suspicious populations. Personal data is collected for one purpose and migrated to others without due diligence and consequential consideration of humans. Data endlessly flows across computer networks without little public knowledge of routes and destinations of sensitive data. The report explains that whilst privacy is a key issue regarding surveillance it is not the only issue. The "Surveillance society poses ethical and human rights dilemmas that transcend the realm of privacy. Ordinary subjects of surveillance, however knowledgeable, should not be merely expected to have to protect themselves." There are issues of social exclusion and discrimination for "surveillance varies in intensity both geographically and in relation to social class, ethnicity and gender." "Individuals are seriously at a disadvantage in controlling the effects of surveillance" because of colossal power differentials. "Individuals and groups find it difficult to discover what happens to their personal information, who handles it, when and for what purpose."

Professional system developers have a public duty to consider fully the wider implications of surveillance related systems and to ensure that human consequences are understood and that these mitigate the desire to exploit the advances and convergence of technologies in order to achieve economies of scale. Interoperability of surveillance related systems must be justified each time rather than accepted as a de facto standard.

The notion of impact analysis has been discussed previously in ETHIcol. The report argues for the adoption of Surveillance Impact Assessment which promotes the consideration of privacy protection and surveillance limitation from both the individual and society perspective. This impact assessment should be used by professional system developers as part of the methodological approach. Three questions need to be answered:

By addressing these three questions and ensuring surveillance systems are confined within the boundary of societal acceptability maybe we will live in a free society rather than a surveillance society.

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