If the feverish discussion in the press and the sudden appearance of spokesmen from the secret services and police are anything to go by, it seems that the UK government’s Investigatory Powers bill, announced in the 2015 Queens Speech, is due to appear soon.
Of course, Britain has been here before.
Under the previous Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, the Tories...
Professor William Webster and the Stirling CRISP research team have been awarded a 4 year ESRC grant entitled 'SmartGov: Smart Governance of Sustainable Cities'. The award was made under the FAPESP-ESRC-NWO joint call on Sustainable Urban Development and the project will run between 2015 and 2019. The SmartGov project incorporates international comparative research of three Smart cities, in...
This week CRISP was delighted to welcome Dr Caroline Lancelot-Miltgen from Audencia Business school in France as our first international visitor. Dr Lancelot-Miltgen spent time with CRISP at Open and Stirling Universities. Her research focuses on the dynamics of user privacy behaviours. Her work also addresses issues of identity, e-commerce and public policy, social media, digital services and...
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada has awarded a $2.5 million (Canadian Dollars) research/partnership grant to fund research into the vulnerabilities generated by big data surveillance. The project includes the development of a strategic relationship between the two preeminent academic surveillance research centres, the Surveillance Studies Centre in Canada...
As the financial problems in the Euro zone rein on, I am drawn back to a dispute I read about in December 2014 when I was completing some work on credit scoring in the UK. This dispute also revolved around credit and the likelihood of payments. In this case, Bev Oates was calling for an investigation into the affairs of UK Credit Referencing Agencies. Oates had been involved in a commercial...
Recently I rang the telephone numbers displayed on CCTV signs in order to gain access to my CCTV data. After all, this is my right. However, only 6 of the 17 organisations approached provided my data.
I have been researching in the area of surveillance and surveillance studies for a number of years now and I have a deep interest in how laws governing aspects of surveillance actually work...
It is possible, desirable and respectful of human rights to conduct targeted surveillance on identified suspects with independent judicial oversight. It doesn’t appear feasible, however, to collect information on everything and everyone en masse. So why keep doing it?
The 2010 Conservative party election manifesto promised to ‘roll back the frontier of the database state’. It promised to...
Revelations from Edward Snowden about the scope of intelligence activities in the UK have led to renewed attempts to enhance democratic oversight of the UK’s security services. The heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ appeared before the Intelligence and Security Committee for the first time, while Lord Macdonald called for strengthened parliamentary accountability. In this post, we ask democracy and...
by Frédéric Bisson CC BY
The saturation of media coverage of surveillance and spying (including GCHQ, the Snowden revelations, Mrs. Merkel’s mobile), together with the furore over phone hacking, has elevated the salience of information and privacy issues in the public and political consciousness. Whether this attention will be converted into changes in policy and practice remains to be seen, as new public issues...
A new game which looks at how much personal information people are willing to reveal freely online and its cost to them, has been launched by The Open University Business School. This game enables you to explore issues relating to surveillance encountered in everyday life.
Play the Privacy Game with friends or against the computer assuming the identity of various characters: Hacker, Bank...
