The Home Affairs
Committee will conduct the inquiry, called 'A Surveillance
Society?', so that it can produce rules for Government to follow
when building up increasing amounts of sensitive and private
information on the general public.
"The inquiry will consider the growth of
numerous public and private databases and forms of surveillance,"
said a Committee statement. "They either derive directly from the
work of the Home Office and its related public functions or are
controversial because whilst they offer the potential to play a
part in the fight against crime their use may impinge on individual
liberty."
"The inquiry will focus on Home Office
responsibilities such as identity cards, the National DNA Database
and CCTV, but where relevant will look also at other departments’
responsibilities in this area, for instance the implications of
databases being developed by the Department of Health and the
Department for Education and Skills for use in the fight against
crime," it said.
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has
warned that UK citizens are becoming increasingly monitored, and
that while the Government is responsible for gathering more
information about people, citizens themselves are not protecting
their rights vigorously enough.
"Two years ago I warned that we were in danger
of sleepwalking into a surveillance society," Thomas said in
November. "Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a
surveillance society that is already all around us."
The
Commissioner's office warned late last year that there was
increasing pressure in government circles to increase surveillance.
"It's a big business, the business of data aggregation in the
private sector, bringing together information on people's habits
and activities to sell commercially," Assistant Information
Commissioner Jonathan Bamford told OUT-LAW
Radio, the weekly technology law podcast, in November.
"With the public sector we see an increase in
pressure for information sharing, the Government has its
transformational government agenda, the idea that if only public
authorities shared more information, they'd do better things for
the public. I think we have to be clear on what the boundaries are
in terms of data protection rules and public acceptability," said
Bamford.
The inquiry will, said the Committee, use the
Commissioner's work as a starting place. "The Committee’s aim is
not to carry out a comprehensive detailed review of the subject of
the kind recently carried out by the Surveillance Studies Network
on behalf of the Information Commissioner, but to build on the
Information Commission’s work in exploring the large strategic
issues of concern to the general public, with a view to proposing
ground rules for Government and its agencies," it said.
