Systematic government access to private-sector data

Abstract

Governments around the world have long sought access to personal information about individuals. The past half century witnessed the rise of what Professor Paul Schwartz has described as the ‘data processing model of administrative control’, 1 in which data are routinely collected and used for many purposes including to deliver social services, administer tax programmes and collect revenue, issue licences, support hundreds of regulatory regimes ranging from voter registration to employee identity verification, operate public facilities such as toll roads and national parks, and for law enforcement and national security. 2 Government appetite for information about individuals has intensified in the twenty-first century, largely fed by three developments. The first is the appearance of new and dangerous threats to national security, demonstrated by terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid, London, Mumbai, and elsewhere and compounded by the rise in militant Islamic fundamentalism and increased concerns about chemical and nuclear weapons and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The second is the explosion in the volume of digital data routinely generated, collected, and stored about individuals’ purchases, communications, relationships, movements, finances, tastes—in fact, about almost every aspect of people’s lives in the industrialized world— and the ever growing power of technologies to collect, store, and mine such data.