Description
Personal data, like one’s medical diagnoses or apprenticeship placements, has traditionally not been considered relevant for police trying to detect conspiracies or disrupt serious crime. Why would it be? But, unlike the communications intercept data which has traditionally been the object of police surveillance, personal data is readily available – held in great volumes by the health service, social services and schools. In the era of big data analytics, the volume and variety of data (rather than its immediate relevance to crime) make it valuable for pattern and anomaly detection. A ‘data double’ can be created, profiled, and risk assessed by police, just by bringing representatives of health, education and social care around a table in a traditional multiagency format. This, and the fact that personal data does not require a warrant for police to collect, makes our banal records of significant interest to the police.
Data Protection legislation contains ‘exceptions’ to the privacy rights otherwise held by populations. These exceptions (such as the crime prevention exception) constitute a new raison d’etat, in surveillance. If the police want the personal data, they can collect it from other agencies – simply by being police. The paper explores the utilisation of Data Protection exceptions in three covert surveillance/multiagency programs. Given the complicity of Data Protection ‘protections’ in this surveillance regime, the paper wonders whether a ‘right to be forgotten’ could ever re-establish a space beyond state control
