Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-399)
Professor Angela Sasse, Professor Martyn Thomas and
Dr Ian Forbes
27 FEBRUARY 2008
Q380 Lord Woolf: That is surely the
thing. All these matters are cases where judgments and balance
have to coincide. All I was questioning was that you do not improve
the process of making a judgment by imposing disproportionate
penalties. Now there may be conduct which is wrong, but to put
a disproportionate penalty, especially when the disproportion
is one which means it could never actually be enforced because
the cost of enforcing it would be so colossal that it was unlikely,
does not necessarily achieve the object you want to achieve.
Professor Sasse: I would argue that the
current penalties that the Information Commissioner's Office can
hand out are really completely disproportionately small.
Q381 Lord Woolf: That does not answer
the point; that does not help.
Professor Sasse: Like Martyn, I would
actually say that there should be a flat rate. It would have an
incredibly good pedagogical effect on the people who are handling
the data. I am an expert on human factors and security and I look
at corporate organisations when things go wrong, why they go wrong.
The key problem is really that our ability to assess risks associated
with information technology with electronic data has not kept
up, it has not developed in the same way as we are able to read
risks in the physical world and even there, human beings are not
terribly good at it. The people who are handling the amounts of
data, because they are in contact with them every day, are utterly
blasé about the risks associated with the data and the
value and they have no understanding, I can assure you from my
research, about the impact that that disclosure or leaking of
those data has on the lives of the individuals who are affected
by this leakage. Given that it is Government handling their own
citizens' data, that is something that has to change. The Government
have a duty of care.
Q382 Lord Lyell of Markyate: That
moves us on to the second question where UKCRC's evidence says
"There currently is little interest from government in committing
resources to the evaluation of existing surveillance technology".
I take what you have just said to be wrapped up in the idea of
evaluation. What kind of technologies should be evaluated and
who ought to carry out the evaluation?
Professor Sasse: The one area where we
have had an evaluation after almost 15 years of deployment has
been CCTV and it was evaluated in that case by criminologists
and their conclusion was that the benefits of it were not proportionate,
it meant that the claims the Government had made about the impact
it had on crime prevention did not hold up to scrutiny and that
certainly it was not in proportion to the amount of money that
had been spent on it.
Q383 Lord Lyell of Markyate: Many
of us feel that is counterintuitive. What do you think?
Professor Sasse: Many things in science
turn out to be counterintuitive, but really it is fair to say
that science currently is an inter-disciplinary area, how you
use economic knowledge together with knowledge about social science,
criminology; it is a very inter-disciplinary area. You need to
agree on how you are measuring the cost of these various factors,
of the impact it has on individuals, of the impact it has on victims
of crime, and you need to look very carefully at how much money
you are actually spending on collecting information and keeping
it secure.
Q384 Lord Lyell of Markyate: So my
question is: who ought to carry that out?
Professor Sasse: My view is that we have
the expertise in the UK, but certainly the Information Commissioner's
Office has legal expertise and the technical expertise to some
degree. The National Audit Office has expertise in this area and
CSG of course has a lot of expertise when it comes to how we should
value the risks when it comes to criminal or terrorist activity.
In my view the problem is that very often when they do investigations
they are not properly independent. The reports have to be agreed
with the departments who commission them and if you make the effort
to read the full report and compare it to the summary, you can
see that things are ... I will leave it there. A certain amount
of pressure seems to be exerted to make it sound better than it
actually is, or make it sound less bad than it actually is and
certainly, if I compare it with other European countries, I do
not feel these agencies are currently really in a position to
make independent assessments.
Q385 Lord Lyell of Markyate: The
Civil Service whitewashes it, does it?
Professor Sasse: I could not possibly
comment. Also, to be fair, this is a process that happens quite
often in political life and it is understandable that different
stakeholders try to exert influence. There is another case which
was about how effective biometric recognition techniques were
where in another country influence was clearly exerted to make
the findings of a study look much, much better than they actually
were, or where reports were being withheld.
Q386 Lord Rowlands: When the police
gave us evidence on CCTV, they accepted the point about crime
prevention but they said there had not been any evaluation on
crime detection and that if there had, there would be a better
assessment. I do not think I bowdlerised their evidence. They
also told us that they do do evaluations on DNA, they have to.
Professor Sasse: They do evaluations
... ?
Q387 Lord Rowlands: On the value
of DNA in terms of crime. I thought one of the witnesses said
that. I will check it out.
Professor Sasse: Basically the evidence
that has been presented is anecdotal and it presents cases where
it helped to solve the crime but, as Martyn said, very often it
is not necessarily very clearly investigated whether the conviction
could have been assured by other means, whether other evidence
would have led you to the same conclusion.
Q388 Lord Rowlands: In the most recent
case the evidence was that CCTV and DNA in that case played a
very particular role. You cannot say you would have found it anyway.
Why not accept the value of that evidence?
Professor Sasse: Because you have nothing
to compare it with.
Professor Thomas: That is a very dangerous
argument. You could use it to justify torture.
Q389 Lord Peston: Many countries
do.
Professor Thomas: Absolutely. So that
argument is not a strong argument for using a technology. The
fact that, on occasions, it has proved to work, does not give
you any information at all about whether it is a cost-effective
way to use your resources and you have to put in the balance the
potential risks to the population at large of holding that sort
of data about people.
Q390 Lord Rowlands: I do not accept
your argument making a comparison between torture and actually
just collecting CCTV evidence of the kind we are talking about.
Professor Thomas: I am merely demonstrating
the nature of the argument: I am not trying to equate the two
issues.
Lord Rowlands: But you did.
Q391 Lord Morris of Aberavon: There
is nothing new in this; we have had fingerprint evidence over
centuries.
Professor Thomas: And interestingly,
when there was a serious evaluation of the value of fingerprint
evidence, it turned out to be scientifically pretty shaky too.
Q392 Baroness O'Cathain: May I just
track back a few sentences to what you said about evaluation of
the value of CCTV cameras and you said that the police more or
less said that they were not that valuable? Can you put any sum
of money onto the deterrent effect? The ordinary man or woman
in the street actually sees something and knows they are on camera
and I am sure there is a deterrent effect in that and that does
not seem to come into your equation.
Professor Sasse: Criminologists do factor
that into account and there was a report on that.
Q393 Baroness O'Cathain: How do they
know what I am thinking and then I just suddenly think I am being
looked at so I will not go and nick that cutting in Wisley or
wherever?
Professor Sasse: What for instance I
can tell you is that maybe CCTV causes crime to drop in the area
where you have deployed it, but then it increases in areas that
are bordering it, meaning effectively you are just displacing
it.
Q394 Baroness O'Cathain: Is it not
universal now?
Professor Sasse: No.
Professor Thomas: It turns out that CCTV
cameras make people fear crime less but the crime that they principally
fear is violent crime and most violent crime is not premeditated.
If you were to take evidence from the Probation Service, they
would tell you one of the biggest reasons why violent crime exists
is that people cannot control their emotions, either because of
the substances they have been taking before the crime or simply
because it is in their nature to find it difficult to control
themselves. Under those circumstances the presence of CCTV has
no deterrent effect whatsoever. The studies show that the deterrent
effect of CCTV on violent crime is actually very small and whereas
there is a strong displacement effect of other sorts of crime,
for example breaking into vehicles, you can actually reproduce
an equally strong effect simply by improving street lighting.
Better street lighting, particularly in areas that are very poorly
lit, also has a very powerful deterrent effect on premeditated
violent crime like people lying in wait for women and sexually
assaulting them. So it is worth carrying out proper, ideally academic—Lord
Peston and his colleague should be the people doing the evaluation
work—proper evaluation of the different strategies that
are going to be deployed and then making your policy based on
sound evidence, rather than on how people feel.
Dr Forbes: May I add something from the
social science perspective? One of the reasons that the results
of the studies into CCTV seem counterintuitive is that we begin
with the assumption that this single thing, CCTV, is the crucial
thing which we will then test. However, there is not ever one
crucial thing in terms of human behaviour; it only ever makes
sense to consider a range of things. All these studies show that
CCTV may work to reduce crime levels in an area in association
with a whole series of other measures, also street lights to make
the CCTV terminals work. So what these studies always show is
that there is no single thing that you can do to change a human's
behaviour—apart from kill them—and that is the way
that the social science evidence will always lead us, to say let
us think of this in a more complex way, let us see this in a nuanced
way. We have to release the instinct to say there is an answer
and we can find it and we can implement it and thank goodness
it is technological, because it is going to be cheap and it is
going to be easy to do. I am afraid that all the studies will
show that is never going to be a possibility; that is just not
the way humans are.
Q395 Lord Peston: Of course I agree
that we must study these things properly, but we do run into the
problem, following Lord Lyell of Markyate's question to you, that
people are irrational. So, for example, whenever I ask anybody
about CCTV cameras, they tell me they make them feel safer. Now,
if we go back to my favourite area, we know in the area of risk
taking that our aircraft are ridiculously safe. If we look at
how people manage their own affairs in their own households, they
take enormous risks, but if you were to say—and as an economist
I have always argued—that the risk taking in their household
is how safe our aeroplanes ought to be then they say "No
way", if people feel that CCTV cameras are a good thing and
they feel safer, then do we not have a problem when saying all
our research shows you are wrong because they say "Well,
we still want the CCTV cameras"? Look at local authorities
who are putting them up all over the place for no obvious useful
reason, except that they think their electorate wants them. What
do we do?
Professor Thomas: If the reason for doing
it is to make people feel safer, then you do not need to record
the images and you do not need to retain them.
Q396 Lord Peston: I do not disagree
with that, but a lot of the evidence is that we do not need these
cameras under any circumstances, except that people want them.
Professor Thomas: Absolutely, in which
case, if the reason that you are putting them there is because
people want them, you do not need even to connect them up.
Lord Peston: I agree and of course your point,
which it had not occurred to me until you made it, about better
street lighting, is an enormously powerful point and it shows
that evidence can affect people; it affected me just now anyway.
Q397 Lord Lyell of Markyate: You
were saying that it merely displaces crime, but that is very valuable.
If it displaces it, quite obviously the potential criminal is
going elsewhere; that is what displacement means. So it is influencing
crime; that must be true. If you were to be able to get the police
to turn up quickly, which is much more difficult, it would have
an even more deterrent effect. Is that not correct?
Dr Forbes: It is true that there is some
evidence that it displaces, but that then tells you that CCTV
is not reducing crime, it is only moving it.
Q398 Lord Lyell of Markyate: Well
that matters to me.
Dr Forbes: It depends where you are;
not if you are where they go. If it is displaced towards you,
you would not be happy about it.
Q399 Lord Lyell of Markyate: I am
a shopkeeper.
Dr Forbes: There are communities where
that is the case and it tends not to be the better-off communities
where that crime is displaced towards. That has to be a concern
in terms of social justice. We are not going to spend taxpayers'
money to make sure crime only happens to the poor. That would
be an interesting decision to see discussed in public. So, it
is not going to reduce crime, it is going to displace it; that
is an issue. You were also concerned about ... ?
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