The fight against terrorism justified a massive invasion
of privacy by government, says the architect of the government's
national security strategy.
But this was "greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of
law, or derogating from fundamental human rights," said David
Omand, the Cabinet Office's former security and intelligence
co-ordinator, in a research paper to the Institute of Public Policy
Research, quoted by the Independent.
Omand said the government needed access to personal details in
order to build profiles of terror suspects by data mining. However,
reports from the US suggest such profiling is only partially
successful at best.
The data included information on airline bookings and other
travel data, passport and biometric data, immigration, identity and
border records, criminal records and other government and private
sector data, including financial and telephone and other
communications records.
Omand said some of this information was held offshore in other
jurisdictions, but that the government would require access to
it.
Governments are already collecting and sharing much of this
information through bilateral and multilateral agreements covering
passenger name records, visa applications and border surveillance
systems, among others.
"Access to such information, and in some cases to the ability to
apply data mining and pattern recognition software to databases,
might well be the key to effective pre-emption in future terrorist
cases," Omand said.
Omand's paper outlined plans to track terror suspects through a
state database that would also contain the details of innocent
people.
He said modern intelligence access often involved intrusive
methods of surveillance and investigation that might have to be at
the expense of some aspects of privacy rights. "This is a hard
choice, and goes against current calls to curb the so-called
surveillance society," he said.
Governments had to be able to convince people that this was in
their interests, he said. The intelligence community might have to
show it complied with "proper legal authorisation and appropriate
oversight of the use of such intrusive intelligence activity".