Surveillance, Privacy and The Law of Requisite Variety Vasilios Katos (University of Thrace, Greece), Frank Stowell (University of Portsmouth, UK), Peter Bednar (Lund University, Sweden). |
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In both the academic
literature and in the media there have been concerns expressed about
the level of surveillance technologies used to facilitate security and
its effect upon privacy. Government policies in the USA and the UK are
continuing to increase surveillance technologies to counteract
perceived terrorist threats. Reflecting upon Ashby's Law of Requisite
Variety, the authors conclude that these policies will not meet
espoused ends and investigate an alternative strategy for policy
making. The authors develop a methodology by drawing on an isomorphy
of concepts from the discipline of Macroeconomics. This proposal is
achieved by considering security and privacy as economic goods, where
surveillance is seen as security technologies serving ID management
and privacy is considered as being supported by ID assurance
solutions. As the means of exploring the relationship between
surveillance and privacy in terms of the proposed methodology, the
authors use scenarios from a public report commissioned by the UK
Government. The result of this exercise suggests that the proposed
methodology could be a valuable tool for decision making at a
strategic and aggregate level.
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Keywords: Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, Systems, Macroeconomics, Surveillance; Security, Privacy. |