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Police buy software to map suspects' digital movements

Geotime software, bought by the Met, collates data from social networking

sites, satnavs, mobiles and financial transactions

a.. Gallagher and Rajeev Syal

b.. guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 May 2011 12.00 BST

Britain's largest police force is using software that can map nearly every

move that suspects and their associates make in the digital world, prompting

an outcry from civil liberties groups.

The Metropolitan police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the

US military, which shows an individual's movements and communications with

other people on a three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate

information gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation

equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs.

Police have confirmed its purchase and declined to rule out its use in

investigating public order disturbances.

Campaigners and lawyers have expressed concern at how the software could be

used to monitor innocent parties such as protesters in breach of data

protection legislation.

Hanff, the campaigns manager at Privacy International, called on the

police to explain who will decide how this software will be used in future.

" Once millions and millions of pieces of micro data are aggregated, you end

up with this very high-resolution picture of somebody, and this is

effectively what they are doing here.

" We shouldn't be tracked and traced and have pictures built by our own

government and police for the benefit of commercial gain, " he said.

McSherry, a partner at Christian Khan Solicitors who represents

several protesters in cases against the Metropolitan police, said: " We have

already seen the utilisation of a number of tactics which infringe the right

to peaceful protest, privacy and freedom of expression, assembly and

movement. All of these have a chilling effect on participation in peaceful

protest. This latest tool could also be used in a wholly invasive way and

could fly in the face of the role of the police to facilitate rather than

impede the activities of democratic protesters. "

Hugh Tomlinson QC, a specialist in privacy, said that a public body such as

the police must be able to justify the lawfulness of how it uses the

information it collects and retains.

" Storing data because it's potentially interesting or potentially useful is

not good enough. There has got to be some specific justification, " he said.

According to Geotime's website, the programme displays data from a variety

of sources, allowing the user to navigate the data with a timeline and

animated display.

The website claims that it can also throw up previously unseen connections

between individuals.

" Links between entities can represent communications, relationships,

transactions, message logs, etc and are visualised over time to reveal

temporal patterns and behaviours, " it reads.

The software was displayed in Britain earlier this month at the

defence-industry Counter Terror exhibition in Olympia, west London. Curtis

Garton, product management director for Oculus, the company that markets the

programme, said the Metropolitan police was the only UK police force to have

purchased the software. " [There are] a few countries that we don't sell to

but in terms of commercial sales pretty much anybody can buy, " he said.

The issue of data retention and how it is used has become a major political

and judicial issue. The European justice commissioner Viviane Reding

asserted in March that data protection rules also applied to data retention.

" Individuals must be informed about which data is collected and for what

purposes, " she said. " To be effective, data protection rights need to

actually be enforced. "

The Guardian disclosed last week that an 86-year-old man had been granted

permission to launch a lawsuit against police chiefs who kept a detailed

record of his political activities on a clandestine database.

Catt, who has no criminal record, is bringing the high court action

against a secretive police unit which systematically logged his presence at

more than 55 peace and human rights protests over a four-year period.

Some academics have praised the software as a positive move for the police

in their fight against terrorist groups and organised crime.

Professor Glees, director of the University of Buckingham's Centre

for Security and Intelligence Studies, said he was aware of tracking

software such as Geotime and described its use as " absolutely right " .

" There are these dangerous people out there and we need to stay ahead of the

game in order to deal with the threat that they pose, " he said. " My feeling

is: if it can be done, and if its purpose is the protection of the ordinary

citizen that wants to go about their lawful business ... then it's

absolutely fine. "

A spokesman for the Met confirmed that Geotime had been paid for and said

several possible uses were being assessed including as a tool in " telephone

investigations " . He declined to clarify what a telephone investigation might

be or how much the software cost and could not comment on whether the

software might be used during investigations into public order offences in

the future.

" We are in the process of evaluating the Geotime software to explore how it

could possibly be used to assist us in understanding patterns in data

relating to both space and time. A decision has yet to be made as to whether

we will adopt the technology [permanently]. We have used dummy data to look

at how the software works and have explored how we could use it to examine

police vehicle movements, crime patterns and telephone investigations, " he

wrote in an email.

Alongside the Met, the Ministry of Defence is also examining Geotime. A

spokesman said: " The MoD is assessing Geotime as part of its research

programme but it is not currently being used on operations. "