House of Commons - Home Affairs

Select Committee on Home Affairs Fifth Report

Annex: technological developments

This annex sets out some key technological developments in terms of surveillance capability, drawing on the work of the Surveillance Studies Network and the Royal Academy of Engineering and to the comments of our witnesses. We looked not only at significant changes in recent years but also at how these and other changes might affect how information about people and their activities is collected, stored and used in the near future.

The Surveillance Studies Network has identified five key areas in which the rapid development of technology has "helped to change the nature of surveillance": telecommunications, video surveillance, databases, biometrics and locating, tagging and tracking technologies.[336]

Telecommunications

The Surveillance Studies Network argues that throughout the last two decades, technological development and change has led to a diversification in the kinds of technology used for telecommunications. As examples of these new kinds of technology, the Surveillance Studies Network provides the following:

Radio frequency devices now enable large-scale cellular or mobile telephony; optical fibre cabling enables high-speed digital fixed internet connection, and a combination of both enable wireless computing. Mobile telephony delivers not only voice calls, but text, image and video messaging, as well as location-based services. Internet technologies enable both asynchronous communications such as email, bulletin boards and newsgroups, as well as synchronous communications such as chatrooms, instant messaging and webcam/video messaging.[337]

Technological developments have also allowed these different means of communicating to converge and become interoperable so that internet connection can be made via mobile phones and calls can be made via desktop computers. The Surveillance Studies Network points out that the exchange of signals or data between devices which is required for these technologies to work "generates the mechanisms for the capture, monitoring and storage of information about that exchange".[338]

Video surveillance

Alongside the growth in the extent and scale of video surveillance, the Royal Academy of Engineering says that concerns arise from "the shift to digital technology, which has enabled two significant developments":

First, digital recording capacities mean that images can be stored indefinitely, searched digitally, analysed, reproduced and manipulated with increasing ease. Second, images from any camera can be made available instantly to anyone with the capacity to receive data in this form.[339]

Technological developments allow cameras to be linked as a network, and their footage to be streamed to the internet or television. They also allow footage to be stored digitally and searched automatically.

Biometrics

A biometric is a measurement of a biological characteristic such as fingerprint, iris pattern, retina image, face or hand geometry; or a behavioural characteristic such as voice, gait or signature. Biometric technology uses these characteristics automatically to identify individuals whose biometrics have been stored on a database.[340] Now used on passport and identity card systems, biometric identifiers are used in border controls and as an access gateway to information and services. The Surveillance Studies Network pinpoints the attraction of biometric systems:

The idea is that accuracy will be increased and fraud reduced. PINs and passwords may be forgotten or lost, but the body provides a constant, direct, link between record and person.[341]

The Surveillance Studies Network notes in particular the development of face recognition software.[342] Facial recognition maps various features on the face, for example, the distances between eyes, nose, mouth and ears.[343] The measurements are digitally coded and this can then be used for comparison and verification purposes. The Surveillance Studies Network says that whilst facial recognition and other biometric video-linked surveillance systems "still face major technical obstacles in operating outdoors on city streets", "considerable research and development investment is rapidly addressing these".[344]

Locating, Tracking and Tagging technologies

The development of devices which can track the movements of good and people has been identified by the Surveillance Studies Network as another significant technological change. The Royal Academy of Engineering points out that "As long as it is switched on, a person's mobile phone can reveal where they are, within a range of 150-400 metres in urban areas."[345] Geographical Information Systems can be used to combine data from database and satellite or other technologies and to visualise the movements of people, vehicles and goods.[346]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are small wireless devices that provide unique identifiers which can be read by remote sensors. Identity Cards and other documentation (such as the 'Oyster' travel cards issued by Transport for London) may now contain RFID tags. Tags on 'e-Passports' (issued in the UK since spring 2006) contain the information and picture from the identification page of the passports. The information can be retrieved by passing the passport over a reader.[347] Newer, 'active' RFID tags emit signals over a greater range and can be sensed remotely.[348]

A further change which the Surveillance Studies Network says "has occurred subtly and largely unnoticed" is the implantation of living beings with chips. Animals such as racehorses and household pets, and humans (a group of around 70 people with degenerative brain conditions were implanted to enable carers to locate them easily), have been implanted.[349]

Future developments

According to the Royal Academy of Engineering, all of the technologies that will have an impact on the mass market in the next five to ten years already exist, whether they are already widely available or are used only by a small number of people. In its report on Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance: Challenges of Technological Change, the Royal Academy of Engineering outlines a "technology roadmap" to set out "how technologies for collecting, storing and processing data are likely to evolve over the next five to ten years".[350] In order to highlight key trends, the Royal Academy of Engineering organises the technologies in three "layers":

Connection technologies: technologies that affect how organisations move data around as well as how they deliver information and services to customers. Improvements in connection technology have the potential to widen the distribution of products and services and lower transaction costs. Examples of connection technologies include RFID, webcam and wifi.

Disconnection technologies: technologies that provide access control to services and resources, to maintain the security of data. Examples include fingerprint, face and iris recognition, mobile phone SIMs and other tamper-resistant tokens or cards.

Processing technologies: technologies that affect how data are handled within organisations. A search engine is an example of a processing technology, as is multi-media memory card (MMC) technology.[351]

The Royal Academy of Engineering draws attention to the differences between these layers and in particular to the implications of those differences for the effect of technology on surveillance. If connection technologies are analogous to doors, it argues, disconnection technologies are analogous to locks:

Most importantly, while connection is easy disconnection is difficult. That is to say, it is relatively simple to create a network between a set of computers, but it is difficult to partition the data on a computer within a network so that the data can only be accessed by certain computers or users. Disconnection will obviously be crucial to privacy and security of data.[352]

Professor Ross Anderson suggested that recent trends—the use of RFID technology, the incorporation of communications technology in an increasingly diverse range of devices, and the interoperability of these devices—would intensify:

what we are going to see is probably a move to a world in which more and more objects are a little bit like computers. In 10 years' time, most things that you buy for more than about a tenner and which you do not eat and drink will have got some kind of CPU and communications in them and even things that you buy to eat or drink may have RFID tags on them ... Fifty or sixty years ago, there were a handful of computers and now we have several computers on our person, mobile phones, laptops, iPods et cetera, and that will go up from a few to dozens. Your car might now have 30 computers in it and it might have 100 in it within 10 years' time and many of these computers will talk to each other.[353]

Pete Bramhall, Manager of Privacy and Identity Research at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories told us that new developments would take place in a context in which "the privacy issues remain the same and the principles for how one should address those privacy issues will also remain the same". The challenge for system designers, he said, would be:

remembering to take account of those principles and not just getting captivated and dazzled by the potential of what the technology could do.[354]

336 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 17 Back

337 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 18 Back

338 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 18 Back

339 Royal Academy of Engineering, Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance: Challenges of Technological Change (March 2007), p 33 Back

340 Biometrics and security, POSTnote 165, Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, November 2001 Back

341 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 24 Back

342 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 24 Back

343 Identity and Passport Service, Biometric passports. Available at: http://www.ips.gov.uk/passport/about-biometric-why.asp Back

344 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 24 Back

345 Royal Academy of Engineering, Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance: Challenges of Technological Change (March 2007), p 34 Back

346 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society: Full Report: revised with a new Postscript (March, 2007), p 24 Back