Surveillance and the Limits of Law Enforcement

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Friday 23^rd - Sunday 25^th April 2010

Conference Synopsis:

Is the loss of liberty the price we pay for freedom?

How much information is being held on UK citizens? What is it being used for? Is trust in public bodies being eroded by the excessive collection and possible mismanagement of data?Now that we have become one of the most monitored societies in the world, are we safer or should the public be mistrustful?

On an issue in which suspicion is rife, this conference – held under the Chatham House rule – will present the hard facts about our increasingly watched society. Informed by national and international experts, we will explore the ethical boundaries of surveillance as a means of enforcing the law.

Points for debate:

“Surveillance encourages discrimination”, said a witness to a House of Lords Constitution Committee.[1] How?Consider the following:surely if we could predict who will be the offenders of the future, we would have the opportunity to create a better, safer society. Moves are underway to implement the technology to identify the 20% of children who will commit 80% of all future crimes when they grow up. The trouble is that the identification is circumstantial. If, for example, a family member has a criminal record, then a child of that family, no matter how well-behaved, may be added to a database which monitors potential offenders.In the wrong circumstances, a database entry could ruin a life.

How much information on citizens do we need? The Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows DNA samples to be taken from all those detained in a police station for a recordable offence, even when the person is not subsequently prosecuted.In effect this means that there is a database of 500,000 innocent people whose samples were taken in this procedure. This includes 39,000 samples of children’s DNA.[2]

What about more direct forms of surveillance: CCTV and communication intercepts?Nobody knows for sure how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK.What is known is that CCTV does not reduce crime.[3] What, therefore, is it good for? Is it just to make people feel safer?Do we feel safer when cameras watch us?

Then there is the interception of communication, upon which our intelligence communities rely. To date, however, this evidence has been deemed inadmissible in court for failing to comply with the protection of information measures known as the ‘Chilcot’ conditions.[4] What will the law look like in the future? What should it look like?

This conference will find out whether we have already ‘woken up in a surveillance state’.[5] If so, are we better off for it? What should be the limits on how the public is monitored, categorised, and recorded?

[1]House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution 2^nd February 2009: Surveillance: Citizens and the State: para 112

[2]Anderson, Brown et al. 2009: A Database State, A Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust publication, p.23

[3]Gill et al. 2005: Home Office Research Study 292, p.115.The report makes it clear that the reduction of crime is a poor measure of whether CCTV is value for money, but clearly this is a controversial issue.

[4]The Rt Hon Sir Paul Kennedy 2009: Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner for 2008, p.4

[5]Widely reported quotation from Richard Thomas, former Information Commissioner, 2006