{"id":22595,"date":"2023-08-02T04:30:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T12:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2023\/08\/02\/news-16325\/"},"modified":"2023-08-02T04:30:03","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T12:30:03","slug":"news-16325","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2023\/08\/02\/news-16325\/","title":{"rendered":"UK intelligence agencies seek to weaken data protection safeguards"},"content":{"rendered":"

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UK intelligence agencies are campaigning for the government to weaken surveillance laws, arguing that the current safeguards limit their ability to train AI models due to the large amount of personal data required.<\/p>\n

GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 have been increasingly using AI technologies to analyze data sets, including bulk personal data sets (BPDs), which can often contain sensitive information about people not of interest to the security services.<\/p>\n

Currently, a judge has to approve the examination and retention of BPDs, a process that intelligence agencies have described as \u201cdisproportionately burdensome\u201d when applied to \u201cpublicly available datasets, specifically those containing data in respect of which the subject has little or no reasonable expectation of privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The categories of BPDs retained by the UK Intelligence Community (UKIC) fall under six categories \u2014 law enforcement or intelligence, travel, communications, finance, population, and commercial \u2014 and are acquired through both overt and covert channels.<\/p>\n

Following this year\u2019s review<\/a> of the Investigatory Powers Act by David Anderson, a senior barrister and a member of the House of Lords, intelligence agencies are now lobbying the government to replace these safeguards with a process of self-authorization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bureaucratic processes around the use of BPDs impact on recruitment and retention of talent,\u201d Anderson wrote in his findings<\/a>, noting that his team had been told the UKIC was finding it difficult to retain data scientists as they were becoming \u201cbaffled and frustrated by what may strike them as pointless impediments\u2026 notably the need to spend months obtaining warranty for standard open-source training data.\u201d<\/p>\n

To tackle this issue, Anderson proposed the introduction of a new category of BPD \u201ccontaining data in respect of which there is assessed to be a low or no expectation of privacy,\u201d such as news articles, academic papers, public and official records, audiobooks and podcasts, and content derived from online video sharing platforms.<\/p>\n

Removing the need for a warrant to analyze what Anderson described as \u201clow\/no datasets\u201d would significantly reduce the time needed to authorize the use of such a BPD.<\/p>\n

However, he recommended that it should not be up to the UKIC to determine what BPDs would fall under this new category, with ministers and judges instead required to authorize and approve the allocation of a dataset into this newly proposed class.<\/p>\n

Anderson also said that \u201clow\/no datasets\u201d that UKIC wished to retain and examine would still be subject to the data protection requirements under Data Protection Act and would furthermore be subject to an additional authorization requirement with associated safeguards. This would be unique to UKIC and not imposed on any other users of such datasets.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is essential that they adhere to strong ethical and oversight frameworks when they use AI techniques as part of their use of investigatory powers,\u201d he wrote, adding that the ethics of AI is one of the most pressing of contemporary issues, extending far beyond the world of intelligence and policing.<\/p>\n

When the Home Secretary announced the review in March 2023 Liberty and Privacy International, two of the UK\u2019s largest civil liberties organizations, released statements strongly resisting any proposal that would weaken the existing safeguards around BPDs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeakening safeguards would be an unjustifiable assault on already reduced rights, and the Home Secretary\u2019s proposals would give even more power to the State to access sensitive data such as a person\u2019s health records or confidential legal communications,\u201d the statement from Liberty<\/a> read. \u201cWe already know that the current so-called safeguards are totally ineffective in protecting our rights and holding those in power to account.\u201d<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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UK intelligence agencies are campaigning for the government to weaken surveillance laws, arguing that the current safeguards limit their ability to train AI models due to the large amount of personal data required.<\/p>\n

GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 have been increasingly using AI technologies to analyze data sets, including bulk personal data sets (BPDs), which can often contain sensitive information about people not of interest to the security services.<\/p>\n

Currently, a judge has to approve the examination and retention of BPDs, a process that intelligence agencies have described as \u201cdisproportionately burdensome\u201d when applied to \u201cpublicly available datasets, specifically those containing data in respect of which the subject has little or no reasonable expectation of privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

To read this article in full, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[11062,10643],"tags":[11113,11063],"class_list":["post-22595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computerworld","category-independent","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-data-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}