Security, Privacy, Information and Surveillance Discussion by Prof William Webster, Prof Charles Raab and Dr Andrew Neil

We live in a surveillance age where digital technology has become ingrained in almost every part of our lives, and the personal data is collected, pooled and examined by various commercial and political agencies.  With such developments we are yet to find our feet with how information should be regulated and in what ways it should flow from one system to another.  Privacy seems to be traded off with security in many dichotomous statements made around who gets to do what, but are these helpful or correct ways of perceiving the issues at stake ?

Surveillance society

In a time when our personal information is a mass commercial product, many aspects of social existence are being affected by information abstracted from digital footprints we make.  Our opportunities and choices are influenced, and our personal habitats are scoured by CCTV and algorithms analysing and interpreting who and what kind of person we are.

 

These issues are of critical importance as we negotiate our collective and individual futures.  To help us understand the nuances and various aspects of the issues a panel of thinkers was brought together in the Royal Society of Arts Festival of Ideas.

 

Here you can listen to the presentations which they gave and read the annotated transcript of the audio recording below.  The three thinkers, Professor William Webster, Professor Charles Raab and Dr Andrew Neil are all involved in thinking through what is at stake as computers extend the human capacity to watch, collate, track and surveill the human environment.

 

They have written extensively on the themes discussed and their work is available to access online or through libraries and bookstores.  As a part of the Royal Society of Arts they all contribute to the aim of the organisation which is to support the generation of an Enlightenment society.


 

Prof William Webster
Prof William Webster

Professor William Webster

Professor of Management Work and Organisation at Stirling Management School, he has researched Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance cameras and Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) for over 20 years.

 

Regarded as an expert in his field his continuing work focuses on governance in the information age (e-government) and sits as a member of the Public Sector Management Research Group as well as the European Group of Public Administration and the International Research Society for Public Management.

 

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Im a codirector of a research centre called CRISP (Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy)

 

One of my other codirectors – Professor Charles Raab (Edinburgh) – is going speak immediately after me. We are interested as a research centre of the consequences and impacts, and meanings of living in a surveillance society; issues to do with information processing, privacy, and surveillance.
You can find out much more information about us on the website, of course, and we are relatively easy to find. Ok, so what we are going to talk about this morning… Ive been asked to talk about surveillance and your lives in a surveillance society; Im also setting up the two presenters who will be talking after me.

 

So, Im going also say something about privacy; Im going to also say something about security, to show how the world of surveillance permeates all different sorts of topic areas – including the things we are going to be talking about this morning.

 

So the surveillance society… When we talk about surveillance people instinctively think about modern technologies, new technologies, but I think we can have a starting point which is about surveillance as a normal human instinct. I think this is one of the reasons of why we are so accepting of surveillance; it is because we understand as a basic human need to undertake surveillance in different sorts of environments.

 

Meercats surveiling

So, for example, think about the mother and the new born child. The mother watching over the child, looking after the child. Think also about some elements of how religion works; about the all seeing god and about looking over the local community. Think about local social groupings, the way that they look after each other.

 

Think about also the way that castles are constructed on hills to oversee the environment – to look out and protect those communities. Surveillance is something which has always happened, it is not necessarily linked to new technology.

 

It is also about power and controls. The mother has control over the child, she is looking after it, she exercises the power. And the same goes in those other examples I used – in religious settings, in the medieval castle setting. There is an element of power and control, so somebody is doing the surveillance and somebody is being surveilled.

 

So the background is that it is not just about new technology. All we have with new technology is that we have new developments in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) which have expanded the potentials to undertake surveillance in new and maybe unforeseen ways.

 

So we see lots of technologies which are a part of our everyday life. So it is very difficult to live in ones society without using new technologies. Think about, for example, CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), our use of the internet, bank cards, credit cards, store cards. We might have smart TVs; we might have lots of different technologies you interact with on a regular basis – your mobile phone’s probably being used a lot today already…

 

These technologies gather information about us. They process information about us and they share information about us. And this happens on a massive scale. These technologies may or may not be in your mind surveillance technologies, but the point is that they have surveillance potentials.

CCTV

Some surveillance technologies like CCTV – they are very explicit surveillance technologies; we know they are their for safety, security etcetera etcetera. But other technologies have latent surveillance potentials.

 

So your mobile phone may be a communications device but it is also a tracking device which could be used to track you. It could be used retrospectively to see where you have been. Also as a device for identifying you. Other technologies which do process information have surveillance capability.

 

What we use in academia is the phrase ‘technologically mediated surveillance practices‘. This is to differentiate between ordinary surveillance that you might do naturally as a human being, and surveillance which is mediated by technology.

 

So when we talk about a surveillance society what we are talking about is the degree to which these sorts of technologies have permeated everything we do. And these information flows shape our activities and they shape our life chances – this is why surveillance is very important.

 

So your use of your mobile phone, your use of the internet actually shapes your future because your profile as a result of using those technologies; you are tracked. That might determine what services and what products are made available to you.

 

So that in turn is shaping your use of those services in the future. The point being that living in a surveillance society; living in a society in which we rely on these sorts of technologies – these everyday technologies (they are not special security technologies; they are everyday technologies) – these do shape our life chances and our futures.

 

How does this affect what we do on a day to day basis ? We generate vast quantities of information as we use the internet or as we use our mobile phones or as we drive our cars – as we use government services. The data which we generate has value, and it can be used by others to provide services; it can be used by marketing agencies to target specific services at us; it can be used by public agencies to profile us – to think about the likelihood of us being a terrorist for example.

 

And the digital footprint, as we often refer to it – those little digital trails which we leave as we go about our business. We use a digital footprint on the CRISP banner to indicate the link between the information society and surveillance society.

 

What I would say about the surveillance society is that it is big business. So there is lots of companies and lots of organisations that are busy engaged in activities which support our economy but also support the emergence of a surveillance society.

 

Think, for example, about companies which do online marketing; think for example, companies which use the internet which sometimes seem to be free like Facebook or Twitter or Google – these companies all use our information to provide the service. We don’t pay for them directly but our data is what is given value, and they sell that data on for advertising and for other reasons.

 

Also surveillance is about having an infrastructure – a telecoms infrastructure, the cable, the satellites – even government facilities. The security industry which is increasingly use all of these technologies for public safety and to tackle issues like terrorism. So surveillance is big business which is integrated into what we do, it is integrated into our economy and integrated into our institutional lives in the UK.

 

So what we can say about the modern surveillance society is that it is all around us. It is ubiquitous. It is subtle. It is normal. It is mundane. We are not talking about secret services and spies, we are just talking about everyday and ordinary behaviour that happens all around us. We shouldn’t be surprised when we find out that our information is used to profile us because this is happening all the time.

 

We shouldn’t be surprised when they capture terrorists because they have been profiling their use of the internet and they have been profiling their friendships networks, for example. So surveillance is embedded into the fabric of everyday life, partly hidden, partly subtle, sometimes difficult for us to see – but we shouldnt be surprised when these sorts of things take place.

 

Academics also talk about something called surveillance creep. The idea behind surveillance creep is very simple – and this happens also with all sorts of technologies – you introduce a technology for one sort of purpose, over time it migrates into other purposes.

 

I think this is what makes surveillance technologies sometimes contested because people might introduce a technology like CCTV to combat crime and disorder but then it is used for issuing parking tickets. So these sorts of ‘creeps’ we find in all sorts of technologies; sometimes they upset people, so sometimes they are contested.

 

So for example, those of you who have bought a new car recently – certainly not academics amongst us I suspect – will now realise that you now don’t need to have a tax disk. You don’t have to display a tax disk on a car anymore because there is a national network of ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras that check whether or not your car doesn’t just have road tax, but is valid to drive; that it is owned by somebody legitimate in the UK; and that it has an MOT; and that it has insurance – all these sorts of things. So that sort of technology – ANPR – has crept into check all these different aspects of car usage.

 

ANRP

 

Ok, so surveillance can be contested. It is often contested, or it may be resisted even, because it involves power relations. It is about an agency, be it a commercial company or the state, surveilling people and influencing their behaviour. That is often why surveillance is contested, sometimes resisted, and there are many examples of that.

 

People try to, for example, rebel against their use of Facebook, rebel against the use of CCTV. So there is no coincidence that the rise of the hoodie coincides with the rise of the CCTV camera revolution. People do feel sometimes that surveillance involves an intrusion into their personal lives, an intrusion into their own personal privacy.

 

So surveillance, control, maybe resistance. In the UK it is often said that we resist surveillance far less than other European countries, which may be a point for discussion later on. Because surveillance is controlling, because surveillance shapes our lives, it therefore requires very careful governance.

 

We need to think very carefully about the rules in which people can use – the ways in which people do use our information. What purposes are valid ? What purposes aren’t valid ? How much information can be collected ? How can it be exchanged ? How do we set those parameters ?

 

On this final slide I just wanted to talk about how the surveillance society links into privacy and security, which the two following speakers are going to talk about. And the point I would make here is that the three – surveillance, privacy, and security – are increasingly intertwined; they are closely joined together in modern society.

 

So in terms of privacy I have already alluded to these huge mountains of data which we all create – and which are used – they have value; they are used by public agencies, they are used by marketing firms…

 

So what sort of rights do we have as individuals in a modern society about the use of this information ? Can we as individuals determine what information is collected ? Can we determine how it is used ? Can we determine when we want it to stop being collected ? Do we have any ownership over the information at all ? Is all the information created and owned by the state or by private agencies ?

 

These are all very pertinent questions for privacy in a surveillance society.

 

In terms of security I think increasingly that we will all be aware that we have this explosion of surveillance oriented security systems and practices, so these kinds of things which I have been talking about – mobile phones, the internet, ANPR, CCTV – are all used for public security, national security, tracking terrorists; so tracking, profiling, identifying.

 

And often we see news items about how these sorts of technologies are used in this way. Now the issue then becomes, should this sort of surveillance take place for security purposes at the mass level – i.e. the sorts of systems that Edward Snowden has alerted us to – or in a more targeted way ?

 

 

Should profiling then target the people who are most likely to be terrorists, most likely to be robbers or car thiefs ? Ok, so the final point I have made about the link between surveillance and security is that they are both very highly emotive subject areas. And interestingly they are said to be like flipping the side of a coin. So you have security; everybody wants security; everybody wants to be safe, so security is good for us and good for society.

 

But people feel a bit ambivalent towards surveillance, maybe even more strongly than ambivalent; maybe people feel that surveillance is bad. People are a little bit scared of surveillance. They feel that surveillance is slightly threatening to them on an individual level. So whilst the two are so closely interlocked, we have different feelings about them; we have different feelings about the purposes of security.

 

So I’m going to finish now – Ive had my two minute warning. Hopefully Ive given you an overview of the surveillance society. Hopefully Ive given you a few ideas about how it is linked into privacy and security. And my concluding comment would be – given what I have just said in the last 15 minutes about our existence in a surveillance society, how on earth do we decide what levels of surveillance are appropriate and how do we govern those levels of surveillance when we have decided what levels of surveillance are appropriate ? So that would be my parting comment.

 

Chair: Thank you very much William. So lots of information there… and now Professor Charles Raab…


 

Professor Charles Raab
Professor Charles Raab

Professor Charles Raab

Professor of Politics and International Relations at the School of Social and Political Science University of Edinburgh, Charles Raab has held the Chair of Government at the University of Edinburgh from 1999 to 2007 and from 2012 to 2015.
His work has focused on public policy, governance and regulation, and particularly information policy which broaches the areas of privacy protection and public access to information; surveillance and security; identity and anonymity; information technology and systems in democratic politics, government and commerce; and ethical and human rights implications of information processes.

 

He sits on various research groups and committees including the Steering Committee of the Centre for Security Research (CeSeR), and is codirector of CRISP (Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy).

 

Time Started: 13 minutes 10 seconds

Thank you very much. I’m Charles Raab I’m Professor of Government at University of Edinburgh, and of course surveillance will be used this afternoon at Murrayfield… May the better team win, and it probably will. What I want to talk about is nicely led into by William my fellow co-director of CRISP (Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy).

 

It relates not just to how to decide about how much surveillance and rights and so on, there is also the question about who decides that, and how that goes through awareness processes and decision making. And one of the things which I wanted to jump off from which set me thinking was the call about the leak of 2013 by the Intelligence and Security Committee, in the wake of the Snowden revelations about the collection of mass communications by security agencies in this country and the USA.

 

And in the committee, which is a committee of parliament, decided that they would have an investigation into the relationship between privacy and security. I don’t want to talk about the findings in their report which was published last week.