be “clear about the usefulness of general data retention obligations in the fight
against serious crime”. That usefulness was said to derive from the capability “to
examine the past by consulting data that retraces the history of communications
effected by persons even before they are suspected of being connected with a
serious crime”.182
(10) Assessment of the SURVEILLE project
3.84.

The EU-funded SURVEILLE project was an ambitious attempt, written up in
some 40 research papers over more than three years, to develop a matrix of
surveillance technologies, scoring them according to the categories of usability,
ethics and fundamental (or human) rights. The concept of such a matrix is a
potentially useful one, though I have previously referred to some of my own
reservations about the project’s methodology, informed by a meeting with
SURVEILLE staff and external assessors prior to its launch in May 2015.183

3.85.

SURVEILLE appears to acknowledge that what it referred to (inappositely, in the
case of the powers under review) as “electronic mass surveillance” is capable of
delivering at least some useful results. But it concluded in a synthesis report that
the “medium-level usability scores” of such techniques were outweighed by high
degrees of ethical and legal risk, and contrasted them with the “clearly higher
usability scores” associated with “traditional (non-technological) surveillance
measures”.184

3.86.

Any thoughts expressed in SURVEILLE on the absolute and relative
effectiveness of covert capabilities were based not on detailed classified inquiries
of the kind that the Commissioners, the ISC, my own Reviews and (in the US)
the PCLOB and NAS have been able to conduct, nor even on the open
conclusions of those inquiries, but rather on what SURVEILLE itself
characterises as “educated guesswork”. If only for that reason, and whatever its
other merits, the SURVEILLE project cannot be considered a source of
comparable weight for assessing the practical operational case for bulk powers
generally, or of the powers under review.

Conclusion
3.87.

182

183
184

In summary, and despite the fact that most of the powers under review were first
avowed only in 2015, positive statements have been made as to the utility of

Case C-698/15 Secretary of State for the Home Department v Tom Watson and others
ECLI:EU:C:2016:572, Opinion of 19 July 2016, paras 178, 181. The case does not relate
directly to the powers under review, though the quoted remarks are transferrable to all bulk
powers in the broad sense of the phrase: 1.5 above.
AQOT p.269 fn 42.
SURVEILLE Deliverable D4.10, April 2015, p.15.

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