Policy Forum Report

[VictorLee]

Please find attached a draft copy of the Outsourcing Policy Forum Report. We would appreciate your thoughts and comments on the document. Please also feel free to share this document with your colleagues and peers. Their feedback is important to making sure we arrive at the strongest final product for the European Commission at the end of the HIDE project.

Thanks,

Victor

[diducu]

System Interoperability
The most accepted definition of “Interoperability” is the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. Interoperability is an essential component of security systems and surveillance programmes. This is more evident in certain fields such as border crossing. Border security is a priority with most of the world’s governments. The increase of interoperability, and the proliferation of public and private databases, are generating an increasing demand to pool data from diverse technologies (e.g. RFID, biometrics, GPS, smart ID cards, etc) and from diverse applications and systems (signals intelligence, Automatic Number Plate Recognition, electronic patient records, DNA databases, etc). This raises concerns for many reasons, not the least because sophisticated ‘data-mining’ techniques enable discovery of unknown and non-obvious relationships within sets of information. Privacy advocates all around the world warn against risks entailed by interoperability. At the same time, interoperability is an effective way to fight terrorism and crime. Interoperability may also protect privacy by “ensuring that personal data processing complies with applicable laws” and provided that “Data minimisation and purpose specification should be built into data analysis systems (as “a priori” conditions for integrating information)”.