Surveillance, privacy and the law of requisite variety

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.