At present, no one doubts that the intelligence services of all countries monitor their citizens. Safeguarding the country from internal and external threats is the reason given by these agencies for using covert methods or, at least, without the people being watched knowing that they are being watched. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have taken a giant leap forward and spies and security forces have benefited from facial recognition and biometric systems, in exchange for filling the streets with cameras and compromising the privacy of people. But the best way to fight the enemy is to know him in depth and for this information and stacks of data are necessary.
This is the reason why the United Kingdom's spy agencies - as reported by The Guardian - have asked the British Government to relax the laws that limit the amount and quality of data they can use to train their models i.a. Unsurprisingly, this claim has prompted privacy experts and civil liberties groups to express alarm at the move, which would remove some of the legal protection introduced in 2016 in the UK.
On the other hand, if the proposal goes ahead, it would make it easier for GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 to use certain types of data that they cannot now use thanks to safeguards in place designed to protect privacy and prevent the use unauthorized disclosure of confidential information. Specifically, the spy agencies want more laxity in the rules governing the use of large volumes of information, known as massive personal data sets (BPD, for its acronym in English).
Intelligence services often use BPDs that are drawn from a wide range of sources. The agencies argue that these data sets help them identify potential terrorists and future informants, which is why they are asking to relax the rules on how they use these BPDs about which citizens already have "little or no expectation of privacy."
The intelligence services believe that this information should be placed in a new category of BPD that could include, for example, content from video sharing platforms, podcasts, academic papers, public records and company information . This is public information and, consequently, citizens already know that it is accessible to anyone and therefore – according to the spy agencies – they are not concerned about their privacy.
The proposed changes were presented to David Anderson, senior counsel and member of the House of Lords, who was commissioned by the British Home Office to review the changes. In his research, Anderson said the agencies' proposals seek to replace the requirement that a judge approve the examination and retention of BPDs, with a faster authorization process.
This attorney explained that agencies had been using AI for many years and were already training machine learning models with BPD. Also that the significant increase in the type and volume of data sets used by agencies means that machine learning tools are "proving to be useful" for British intelligence.
For this reason, Anderson concluded that the law should be amended to create "a less onerous set of safeguards" for the new category of BPD and said that "the deregulatory effect of the proposed changes is relatively minor."
However, he recommended maintaining a degree of ministerial and judicial oversight of the process, rather than allowing members of the intelligence services to decide for themselves which BPDs are placed in the new category.
