Abolishing the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner (BSCC) creates oversight gaps and will create, rather than remove, regulatory complexity, according to an academic report.
Work under the umbrella of the SCC such as the Surveillance Camera Standards Group, certification and Buyer’s Toolkit, are widely recognised across surveillance camera users, civil society organisations, industry professionals, academic experts, regulators and law enforcement communities. The BSCC has become a single point of contact for users, installers and the general public. No provision has been made to replace these activities in the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, by which the UK Government is looking to reform data privacy, going beyond the current 2018 Data Protection Act which echoes the European Union regulations GDPR. Any belief that SCC functions will happen automatically through the casework of stretched public bodies, with notional oversight of the surveillance space, appears unrealistic, the report argues.
The authors – Prof William Webster, a founder of the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP) and Prof Pete Fussey, also of CRISP – make the point that ‘data protection’ and ‘surveillance’ are not the same – even more so given the prospect of AI-tools – and to place surveillance inside data protection ‘constitutes a depletion of meaningful oversight’. The outgoing commissioner, Prof Fraser Sampson, commissioned the report. The commissioner before, Tony Porter was among contributors; those from the security industry who are credited by the authors include Tony Gleason, as CCTV Manager for Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council and the outgoing chair of the Public CCTV Managers Association (PCMA), and incoming PCMA chair John Bonney, CCTV Lead, Intervention and Prevention, Blackburn and Darwen Borough Council; CCTV trainer Gordon Tyerman, Tim Raynor as vice chair for the Video Surveillance Section, British Security Industry Association (BSIA), besides numerous academics and senior police officers.
The report states: “Rolling back oversight at a time of AI-driven surveillance tools, and during a period of highly polarised debate is likely to create additional challenges for surveillance users to gain trust, legitimacy and support within the communities they aspire to serve.”
The Data Protection and Digital Information (DPDI) Bill proposes substantial changes to the oversight of overt surveillance and biometric materials besides the regulation of data processing. The densely-argued report concludes that, if enacted in current form, the DPDI ill will create significant gaps in the oversight of uses of surveillance cameras and biometric materials. The capacity to address future challenges associated with increasingly sophisticated and digitally advanced surveillance tools will be depleted. That’ll impact the fundamental rights of individuals, but also likely complicate the work of those legitimately using technologies to keep the public safe, according to the report. Moreover, the arguments used to justify such changes, including the claim that sufficient and comparable oversight exists elsewhere, are found to be wanting, the academics writes. They also and fail to recognise the complexities of the current regulatory landscape and the protections offered by the BSCC in an era of increasingly intensive advanced and intrusive surveillance.
The report argues that it’s essential that the surveillance camera code of practice, or some variant thereof, with a way of ensuring compliance, is retained, for the sake of the work of local authority surveillance camera operators and managers, police and other public bodies. “Widespread support for these measures exists across this range of practitioner communities and the code is unequivocally seen as a means to raise standards,” the report says. The code supports better practice across the sector.
Yet the abolishing, as the report goes on to examine, comes at a time of ‘accelerated innovation in the scale and capability of surveillance technology’. These issues are not going to go away, the report states; nor are ‘heightened challenges for policing agencies and other public bodies to regain public trust and confidence’. The authors warn: “Rolling back oversight at this time is highly likely to split the debate further, making it more challenging for surveillance users to gain trust, legitimacy and support within the communities they aspire to serve.” If oversight of surveillance and codes aren’t made legally binding and include provision for meaningful enforcement, we might see ‘cherry picking’ of convenient parts of the growing library of guidance and well-meaning yet legally unenforceable digital ethics principles, the authors suggest.
Background
The Digital Information and Data Protection (no.2) Bill) (DPDI Bill) entered Parliament during 2023. The stated aim of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT): simplifying, bringing clarity and future proofing the oversight of surveillance cameras and biometric materials. Part V of the DPDI Bill seeks to remove the obligation on the Government to publish a Surveillance Camera Code of Practice (SCCoP) and remove the post of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), as set up by the Coalition Government of 2010-15 under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.
You can read the report at the commissioner’s website: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-the-functions-of-the-bscc-independent-report.
Photo by Mark Rowe; public realm camera, car parks, Wells, Somerset, midsummer.
