Surveillance society
Date: 14 May 2010
Authors: John Cooper QC
Issue: Vol 160, Issue 7417
Categories: Opinion, Human rights, Local government, Public
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!”
So declared Number Six in the ground-breaking 1967 television series The Prisoner.
At the time of its production, the world was gripped in a Cold War, where surveillance and the gathering of data was an integral part of the way countries protected themselves. Number Six represented a challenge to this, as he would shout from the shoreline of The Village: “I am not a number, I am a free man!”
So what has changed?
The UK is one of the three top surveillance states in the world, next to China and Russia. In Britain there are presently over five million CCTV cameras recording our lives. Databases have been created for almost every facet of human behaviour, from shopping habits through club cards, to the surveillance promised land of mobile phones and the internet.
We are reassured that they are controlled by legislation and most specifically, the Data Protection Act 1998. But does it really work?
The data protection principles sound reassuring. They include strictures that personal data shall be obtained for a lawful purpose and not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose. Furthermore, personal data shall be accurate and kept up to date, and most importantly, it will not be kept for longer than necessary.
As a norm, data should only be processed if we give our permission, provided substantially, that the data is not required for reasons of crime detection, taxation or national security.
The record of UK government data loss does not fill us with confidence. Their files report examples of 1.7 million records from the Ministry of Defence, lost as a result of a missing hard drive (October 2008), 25 million records of families of child benefit claimants, lost following the inadequacy of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, described as “woefully inadequate” and “muddling through” by the Independent Police Complaints Commission in June 2008, and the loss of 21,000 patient addresses and treatment records at Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust as a result of a managers laptop being stolen from his car while he and his family were on holiday in Edinburgh in August 2008. This incident should raise a particular warning to those of us who are rather cavalier with our personal data. It is the aim of central government to upload to a central retrieval system 50 million patient health records.
Medical records
The development of a medical records database for all patients in England is pivotal to the NHS computer upgrade in England, which is the largest healthcare IT programme in the world. Already, 1.25 million patients are in the system. Patient details such as allergies, medication and adverse reactions will be recorded, and as the letter sent out to patients by the NHS observes: “Over time it will build to include information about other health issues considered important to your wellbeing.”
The letter sent to patients, has, what many might consider, to have a threatening undertone about it—“If you choose not to have a Summary Care Record, your health records will stay as they are now and you will not receive the benefits I have outlined.” Of most concern is the fact that if you do not wish to be placed in the system, you must opt out, otherwise the details of your medical records will be placed in the NHS computer to be added to at the discretion of the medical profession.
The opt-out form is another example of “do you really want to do this?” drafting. The top quarter of it, lays down the potentially dire consequences, as the NHS would see it, of not complying, which must be particularly intimidating to the elderly, sick or vulnerable.
Although the 1998 Act does not mention privacy at all, it was enacted to bring the UK into line with the European Directive of 1995 which requires member states to protect our fundamental rights and freedoms and in particular our right to privacy with respect to the processing of personal data.
It is instructive to refer back to the 1995 Directive to assess how successful the 1998 Act has been for the man or woman on the street. Will it deter the voracious data gathering of governments, private companies or the individual? The evidence suggests not and in this respect, the 1998 Act is a failure.
It’s good to talk?
Even as I am writing this article, I am interrupted by a telephone call from an individual purporting to be from BT—he wants to “confirm my details”. When I refuse, he puts the telephone down on me. When I call BT to report this call, I am informed that it is an example of a large number of nuisance calls, made from overseas staff, attempting to obtain my data to transfer my telephone billing to them. The operator at the real BT told me that there is little they can do about international data collection of this nature. Quite how they obtained my telephone number in the first place remains a mystery.
Duncan Mee of Private Investigators Cereberus told me that “the Data Protection Act is completely useless in protecting the normal man and woman on the street from this sort of abuse”, and confirmed what BT had told me, that the law was impotent to protect us from international violators of privacy.
The 1995 Directive observes that data processing systems are “designed to serve man”. But in a society which demands information, the iconic words of Number Six back in 1967 of “you won’t get it”, today, sound sadly, naïve.
John Cooper QC, 25 Bedford Row. Website: www.john-cooper.info
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