Emerging technology and emergency surveillance or vice versa?

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

In a recent Biometric Update article I illustrated how the police in many countries are beginning to rely on citizen-generated data, foreshadowing some of the implications for regulatory frameworks. Evidence in support of this evolution can be seen in the announcement by the New South Wales government of its innovative BluLink capability. The new technology will allow citizens calling the national emergency number to upload data and livestream footage of events direct to the police control center. As the Minister for Police and Counter-Terrorism said in the press release, this will give the police access to the scene before they have even arrived. Representing the next step in the evolutionary process from a world where the police traditionally needed images of the citizen to one where they now rely on images from the citizen, the adoption of this innovative technology highlights the need for the necessary policies and regulatory frameworks to keep in step.

Corroborating the emergence of a new surveillance relationship between the citizen and the police, this type of technological innovation offers a powerful enhancement to police capability when dealing with rising numbers of emergency calls. It also highlights the fact that the more the police can do with technology, the more important it will be for them to show what they are not doing with it. The Australian innovation brings some interesting considerations for the regulatory and legal frameworks of whichever police forces are thinking of deploying it, as well as some societal considerations for the citizen and the public at large. Direct feeds from the citizen-on-scene can bring different considerations from the traditional descriptive reporting of crimes and incidents to the police and even from those of sharing digital images after the event.

One immediate issue is that of agency, direction and control. Rules governing surveillance by the police and local authorities in the UK have taken account of actions taken in immediate response to an event. However, were a police operator to ask the citizen to point their phone, drone or other device in a particular direction or to zoom in on something/someone, at what point does the citizen become part of the police response as opposed to simply a public-spirited source of relevant information to an urgent event? What matters here is less the specific answer (“10 seconds”, “so long as it is in immediate response”, “never”) and more that all the relevant policies have been updated to address it. Of course, direction and control matter in terms of liability for infractions and damage/loss – in both directions – but it may also have broader implications arising from the regulatory regime governing police surveillance, privacy and the active participation of the citizen.

While technological enhancement to an emergency service response can be groundbreaking, if at any point the real-time intelligence acquires an evidential purpose to support a future prosecution there may be ramifications around disclosure. In a pre-streaming world the High Court in England and Wales held that simply allowing your premises to be used by the police as an ‘observation post’ placed you in the essentially the same position as if you were a police informer while many countries have statutory provisions in place to balance the competing public interest of providing sources of valuable assistance to the police with that of ensuring a fair trial for a defendant.

From the legal perspective, several layers of safeguards for the citizen, the defendant and the criminal trial process have developed but much more slowly than the technological or societal evolution. How will they adapt in response to both the new surveillance relationship we are witnessing and the growth of AI-enabled deepfakes and other technological risks to the evidential integrity of digital material? From the societal perspective how much of this ought to be clear to the citizen streamer at the time they make their emergency call or at all? Moreover, if the concerned citizen is conscientiously streaming images of a residential setting and/or they are doing it in such a way as to avoid alerting the perpetrator, that may meet the more stringent requirements governing covert, directed and intrusive surveillance. Internal policies for the deployment and auditing of ‘surveillance equipment’ may need to be reviewed and revised, particularly if the streaming citizen is using their employer’s equipment for a police purpose and additional considerations around storage and access may arise. At the same time, governments will need to ensure that the applicable regulatory framework purporting to provide assurance, standards and safeguards around police surveillance are consistent with what is an inevitable direction of travel. None of these are deal breakers but all are important policy considerations for the future and we can either try to fit the new technology and its implications into existing protocols or we can rewrite the governance infrastructure to enable emerging technology to be used by the police in way that the citizen expects and to a standard that retains their trust and confidence.

In short, beyond the impressive technological achievement there are legal and societal aspects that will need to be worked through if the many potential advantages are to be realized more widely.

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

Fraser Sampson  |  New South Wales (NSW)  |  police  |  regulation  |  video surveillance