The same team that did the influential Report on the Surveillance Society for the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) back in 2006 will be doing a follow-up report on the state of surveillance in the UK for the ICO and the national Parliament this year. Many of the things discussed in that report, which I coordinated, have been accelerating and intensifying, most obviously things like airport body-scanning and the use of drone surveillance cameras, but other things have stalled or slowed, for example the implementation of the ID card regime and more widespread use of RFID tags outside of inventory systems. We’ll be assessing the state of play and making some recommendations as a result. The project this time will be led by Professor Charles Raab in Political Science at Edinburgh University, and one of the world’s leading experts on privacy regulation, and will also include Dr Kirstie Ball of the Open University Business School, Professor Clive Norris of the Centre for Criminological Research at Sheffield, Professor Steve Graham from the Global Urban Research Unit (my old place) at Newcastle University – all in the UK – as well as myself and Professor David Lyon here at the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, in Ontario. It will be great to be back working with the whole team again, and I hope we can contribute to a more focused debate and some real changes to UK policy and practice. We shall see…
ubisurv 