I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.
I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.
I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.
Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.
History has taught us that before.
We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.
On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.
On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.
To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Kinda, it's domain-name level, which is again an illustration of the lack of understanding the government has; they were even told this during the public comment phase of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, how their own example of "perhaps a teen goes missing and we can see they went on twitter and look on their account" has the reality of "no you idiots [I'm paraphrasing], their phone is constantly talking to twitter regardless of if they're using it or not, or even still alive or not".
On the other hand, those records are worse than being shared with the state, they can be read at any time by a long list of state entities without anyone even needing a warrant. The Welsh Ambulance service being able to do this without needing warrant is one of the big parts of why I left the UK (the other being Brexit, of course).
the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then
in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete
[1] Asya Kazantseva
[2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.
I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference.
Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
Just want to add, the overhead cameras at checkout are pointed straight down and can read your phone password as you put it in to pull up Apple Pay.
It's like a stranger looking over your shoulder, and you can't even tell it to bounce.
The touch + passcode is nice because even if someone watches you enter your passcode it won't matter unless they can spoof the fingerprint reader too, which is highly unlikely. And you can use a much shorter passcode for convenience.
Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.
I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...
I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.
As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.
If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.
Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.
Only the one that's shown on the screen. There are other cameras, including ones in the ceiling that look at the entire machine.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
A likely excuse!!
I did not say "all" machines. If I had meant "all" I would have written "all". That's what the word "all" is for.
Consider: "people like ice cream" Riposte: "not everybody likes ice cream"
I see this kind of response over and over here. It's cliched and irrelevant.
In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."
It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.
Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.
Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.
GDP, measures of inflation: Goodhart's law.
BTW, the cash register was invented because of rampant theft by the cashiers.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
> I don’t see what the cameras add.
Again, stores would not spend money on self-checkouts and cameras if they didn't pay off.
In the Seattle area, the cities are trying to stop grocery stores from shutting down.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
[1] lots of people truly need intervention but America uses therapy to cope with basic shit https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.
They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
The classic combo is Afghan buj + crack but synthetic opioids are starting to make an appearance now the CIA isn’t producing heroin anymore.
It’s nowhere near as bad as the west coast of the US obviously, that’s a whole other level.
I would normally use a different word than crackhead but I thought I’d use the internationally recognised term
there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
Here's a good reference point: if you have one hard drive per camera, and record at 1Mbps, you can store 5 years of footage.
Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.
Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.
However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.
Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways.
When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.
Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking.
> Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.
How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?
If you're more likely to be caught due to the surveillance, logic would dictate that it's the greater deterrent.
I would hazard to say that wouldn't have happened had a police officer been stood there instead.
Some major shops in the UK have photographs of police officers on the door, because it reduces theft!
I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
Indeed, this is not the case in the UK. Its too fucking expensive, and the paper work to approve that is too fucking hard. Most of the time the state will request search logs from google instead. its far cheaper and much higher signal to noise.
Also "intercept" evidence is inadmissible in court, so its not all that useful for convicting people.
Don't get me wrong, the UK like the USA has the ability to do all of this. But its used for specific actions (ie find a bomb-y needle in a haystack) where direct action is required.
AS I said, intercepted evidence won't convict someone here because it can't be used as evidence. so if they see that your messaging someone about planning some attrocity, you'll have to be caught in the act of planning, or a physical device with the messages have to be found.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
Snatched your phone? Sorry mate. But some old lady better not be walking around with a tshirt that says "I support Palestine Action".
I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.
Specifically, think about the reaction you are having based on 1/ your perceived outcomes and 2/ their explanations for it. They seem pretty aligned to me, based on where you are directing your anger. So job well done on their part.
this didnt happen btw
the grooming gangs have largely had white perpetrators and all investigations into the police found that they simply do not listen to women, specially those of working class.
Rotherdam where the big asian men case was found, it lasted 17 years and the police had been investigated twice and failed catastrophically both times. With severe reforms recommended and never implemented. And the fear of being racist had never come up.
The case of the grooming gangs gained attention in 2011. And in 2016 the ex chief of police AFTER being investigated and fired due to gross errors then said that he didnt do more because he was afraid of being called racist.
The subsequent report in 2020 from the conservative goverment had that line too, although it also had copy pasted lines from american far right think tanks.
It seems like a convinient excuse to the fact that the police have shown 0 interest in helping poor people in the country for decades, and have shown misogynistic and racist behaviour in every internal investigation ever done (including the 750 page one done after a cop ra ped and murdered Sarah Everrat)
But I guess decades of internal reviews, consistent problems highlighted and demands for police reform can all be ignored due to the convinient excuse of a fired imbecile who allowed hundreds of girls to be hurt under his watch. There was video evidence, he saw and was brought to a judge and ignored because he thought all girls from council states are basically whores. But I am sure he didnt stop it because the people doing it in his case were pakistani. The grooming gang in scotland that were all white must have been because the cops thought the gang might also be foreign? The school grooming gang in Nottingham which was a catholic school and the priests were just moved, those cops also feared that jesus was pakistani?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
G20 country prison systems that I'm aware of have early release programs, it's almost a requirement to optimise what space there is for those that most deserve prison.
What's at issue with [1] is where, in actual fact, do a couple of teenagers who nicked a quad bike and likely very unintentionally also'd a manslaughter fall on the "violent criminal" spectrum.
Why is this statistic relevant?
>76,869 British nationals were recorded in the prison population at the end of the first quarter of 2024. The remainder of the population was made up of 10,422 foreign nationals, making up 11.9% of the total population, with an additional 578 having no nationality recorded.
It seems the 37% figure may have come from an entry in the table breaking down those non-British nationalities by country:
>All other nationalities 3,899 37.4%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
At one extreme, if the population of London happened to be almost entirely foreign born then it would seem that UK citizens are working overtime at London crime.
E.g. with North Sea oil: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214768/economics/norway-u...
Norway is rich and socialist. I was there a while ago and their billboards had ads from their national refugee council asking for donations... on the Friday evening there was a march for Palestine in downtown Oslo. Imagine how well that would go down in the UK "society".
They set out to rob the nation's wealth in the late 70s, and they largely succeeded.
A better term would be "warlordism", if you want to emphasise the lawlessness of the financial class, or maybe "feudalism" to emphasise that the financial class and the political class are congruent.
They seem to be attacking non-electric cyclists, for fun. Shades of mods and rockers.
I know the anecdotes don't help - they are just anecdotes. But man, it really doesn't fill me with confidence that I'd be given much help if this happened to me.
There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.
I don’t have evidence that shows specific examples of where it happens, but the state apparatus for it to do so exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that it is happening on a daily basis.
What it means is the GDPR doesn't stop ISPs choosing to share when asked, rather than waiting for the warranted request that will come, as long as there is a lawful basis.
Again: I don't really have a problem with that. If you've ever used a website that arranges work for lone workers (freelancers who do site visits, freelance estate agents, models, dog walkers) then you'll presumably want the people who run those communities to feel able to choose to share with law enforcement when asked.
I'd agree that entities that provide their users' data upon a simple request, and a carveout in regulations that allows (not forces) them to do so, fits the definition of proactive.
Maybe we should start wearing masks in public too. There is no upsides in going around with an open face.
They even practice DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink in Blighty, especially in government and parliamentary circles.
In an interview with Ron Martinetti of American Legends website, Laura Huxley called Island "the finest and final work." In Laura's opinion, "He put everything in that. Brave New World was a warning and Island was an offering."
I had a perhaps overly heavy consumption of {X}-topia literature in my early teens.
I think my favorite part of the book was when it just turned into reading the political thesis on the essence of oligarichal collectivism or whatever it is. It's a great cynical parody of modern society, but I still think everyone misses the point is that it isn't so much about surveillance as it's about power through language.
You could just as easily have the book set in 1884 without any of the "future tech" and have basically the same plot going around with busybodies and peeping toms filling the rolls of the telescreens.
All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.
Think for a second or two about the type of folks who get, succeed and even thrive in politics over decades. Not your regular Joe, not a nice friendly balanced individual. No, biggest fuckups with massive daddy issues, school bullies, unresolvable inferiority complexes, sociopaths to the core, for whom the lure of money and power over others trumps everything else. This is the default, regardless of country. Look at politics through such optics and many things will start to make sense, also one would gain more realistic expectations from those folks.
Now, why would such people ever allow that, to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?
It's not about making it happen on them.. it's about forcing them to defend this application on them.. and then using the same argument to application on common people...
As The Joker famously said: "It's about sending a message" lol :)
Yet the UK doesnt have private systems such as Flock like the US does.
I guarantee you that exactly the same statement made about other groups would not even lead to an investigation.
From my experience it's easy to find plenty similar or even more direct or more hatefull messages or calls to action regarding other places, events or more minor movements. But those come from minorities or involve movements with less momentum or movements abroad.
On the other, I do think that we should put people in prison for posting on facebook. That way I won't have to keep seeing my crazy uncle at family gatherings!
As suggested by other people - this is just going to be used to identify, infiltrate and disrupt the numerous peaceful protests that the police aren't keen on in London.
For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.
At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.
Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"
It’s especially disappointing when the entire system is foiled by the balaclavas worn by so many of the country’s criminals every day anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...
Someone who's face resembles that of a known terrorist was detected entering the station 8 seconds ago. He's carrying a backpack and will be on a crowded platform in 37 seconds time. There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
Walk up and place him under arrest. He might have a bomb. He might have a trigger for it, or he might have a dead-man's switch. It might detonate and kill you along with bystanders. That's a risk you take.
Unless you know with certainty that he has a bomb and does not have a dead man's switch, you don't just take his life because you're concerned about what-ifs.
It's no different than cops killing a man because he was holding a wallet, which they imagined might be a gun (e.g. Amadou Diallo).
Police need to stop pretending that they exist within fiction, where the outcome is known by the author. Just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean it's an actual threat.
Since 2001, there's been a real uptick in confusing fear and suspicion for evidence and knowledge.
Is the suspect black?
(I'm asking this because there is evidence suggesting current facial recognition technology is less accurate at matching faces from some demographics, including black people. Why, what did you think I meant?)
https://www.btp.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/images/british...
It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate
Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.
The real issue is not (just) this specific use case, rather it's the govt generally knowing where people are going and where they have historically been.
It’s already easy for the police to prevent protests in a practical sense. It’s a political and legal issue more than a technical one.
If you need to arrest someone in London (someone who might be about to cause harm) then there's a very good chance they will go through a tube station, and they tend to have relatively few, easily controlled exits. Most tube stations have two or less.
A few high profile tube stations occasionally have armed police presence.
But I think the idea that face recognition is being used to suppress protest is pretty overcooked; apart from the utter silliness around the banning of Palestine Action, we have a solid right to protest and we do.
The main problem is London has far too few police officers, and it has a transport system that is under consistent terror threat.
The latter is legitimate, isn't it? Do we not anticipate trying to arrest people who might be in the process of committing a terror attack, on the balance of evidence about their conduct? Or are we just going to wait?
Not to say that hasn't gone wrong (infamously and tragically, although that was largely a failure of conventional surveillance) but one key part of mass surveillance policing is arresting people who are clearly about to do a thing.
That might indeed be disruptive protest where it is illegal — for example if you know someone is intending to deface a painting or a monument, or has been planning to attend a protest to disrupt it.
I think people look at face detection policing in this context and imagine thoughtcrime, when the reality is e.g. finding a disturbed person who has been doing a dry run on pushing a stranger off a tube train platform (a real problem that seems to happen every couple of years), catching someone who has been reported sexually assaulting fellow passengers or who has violently assaulted another passenger or someone above ground (a regular problem), trying to disrupt county-lines drug distribution etc. (absolutely constant), or, heaven help us, finding someone who has been spotted at a national railway station with someone on terror watchlists who has then disappeared into the underground.
London Underground isn't a thing that can be effectively managed with ordinary policing. It has 272 stations, over 70 in central London alone. During rush hour there are up to half a million people in that system at any one time. Tube exits are choke points.
No, arresting people for crimes they haven’t committed is horrifying and bizarre.
We're talking about preparation, and the equivalent of reasonable suspicion for a stop or probable cause for an arrest in the USA, where people absolutely are arrested every day for things an officer has seen enough evidence to believe are about to happen.
e.g. when they do things like holding illegal employment blacklist[1][2][3] of innocent people.
I don't want to live in a country where, for example, the police can punish you just because they don't like trade unions.
What's I find ironic is that all this police state bullshit never seems to actually deal with antisocial behaviour or low level crime, it's always for political infractions.
We have more CCTV in London than almost anywhere else on the planet and you still get harassed outside tube stations by organised gangs of soliciting very forcefully for "charity" collections.
1. https://www.parliament.uk/external/committees/committee-news...
2. https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/ico-40/construction-employ...
3. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
There's a gray area for sure, and in the US you can, for example, be charged with conspiracy to commit murder without actually getting to that end goal. I'm always uncomfortable with how a court decides to allow a trial in such a case, though if someone has actively been surveiling their target, collecting materials or weapons, and ideally documenting their intentions somehow then I do understand why most would consider that itself punishable.
If a person without a warrant gets off the tube and walks in a general direction of a protest, I wouldn't see any grounds for arrest. I'm sure there's still gray area there, say they're carrying smoke grenades or flash bangs or something - though in that case I'd assume the potential crime is possessing those items rather than walking in a direction.
The police don't manage mass protests this way either. If they want to stop you joining a disruptive protest they just cordon off streets, close tube exits, stand in the way and tell you to turn back.
But severely disruptive micro-protests are now a significant problem in London; I am quite relaxed about the idea that someone known to be planning to seriously disrupt might get tracked to their destination, and I suspect so are they, or they aren't very serious about it.
I think people from the USA really misunderstand how policing works here. When we say we are "policed by consent" it is taken pretty seriously.
Back when I was a student, this idea of facial recognition was only a glimmer of possibility and the idea of all of this would have got my freedom fighter hackles up.
But if you've ever been in a tube station, one of the deep lines, when they've had to close exits and you're one of thousands of people who need to get out, you realise that these are high-pressure environments where even British reserve and fairness begin to fray. They are very vulnerable places. So I look at this plan and I am like… nope, doesn't bother me. Getting in and getting out at rush hour bothers me.
I am not without my concerns about the mobile recognition vans; I think there is a risk that they have a chilling effect on gatherings that is disproportionate. I dislike that concept in much the same way that I dislike our regional police force's tendency to get the helicopter out when a bit more road policing might do the job.
But inside the tube? Nope, facial recognition seems like a pretty worthwhile tool, not least because it could be so efficiently deployed.
Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.
If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.
Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.
The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.
Antiterrorism and anti-disorder laws sold to the public as needed to prevent serious threats have been used extensively outside of what I think most would consider reasonable to surveil people, restrict freedoms and harass. The prime example are the stop and search laws, used to search a large numbers of people, predominantly based on racial stereotype, with zero impact on terrorism.
Remember that the Met police is known to be institutionally racist & sexist. It is not an organisation to be trusted.
In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.
What we can do, and should do as a society, is decide on how that technology should be used. And that means regulating it, in the same way that we regulate other technologies. For example, we regulate cars. Not just who can use them, but how they have to be constructed too. And we also place limits on how the authorities can use them, for example the rules that the police must obey when in an emergency response situation.
We are a democracy, so these rules are made by the people we have elected. so when it comes down to it, yes, this is what we as a people have asked for. And we are responsible for the conditions that the police can use this technology under.
FWIW, the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has. And they are an awful lot less accountable.
This will be a good argument when Google or Meta are able to arrest you.
And the thing is that they're not necessarily wrong to want some of those things, but they don't understand or don't care about collateral damage or what you might perceive as a lack of freedom. So they will happily vote for it.
Democracies vote to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Look around you.
By "may harm your defence" what is meant is that Miranda was modified to inform people who are arrested that magistrates and juries are fully allowed to infer that you might be seeking to mislead the court if you didn't tell the police something significant that you later rely on as a defence in court. You're still allowed to do it, and they are allowed to conclude it is sketchy. That's the point of the modification.
Juries do and did this anyway.
The modified Miranda doesn't say you have no right against self-incrimination; it now warns you that if something is crucial to your defence it might be in your interest to mention it so the jury doesn't think you are trying to shine them on.
It's important to understand that this happens in the context of a country that does not have a plea bargaining mechanism. Cases go to court if it is in the public interest that they do (and the police don't decide this). But you can still no-comment your way through an interview and you aren't going to be bullied by a prosecutor into accepting a plea deal.
UK suspects on arrest are, nevertheless, read their rights in what is colloquially understood here as a "Miranda warning". It's my understanding that "Miranda rights" are a sort of colloquial shorthand in lots of countries, because we all see US crime procedurals.
(It's actually called "The Caution", and US Miranda rights were inspired by an earlier version, though AFAIR we borrowed back some changes that were influenced by the Miranda wording, before the contentious modification about "may harm your defence")
The subsequent "they modified Miranda" fuss made quite a bit of international news when it was introduced, with Americans sniping at us about changing it, arguing we'd taken away the right not to self-incriminate, etc., that we'd sullied the grand tradition of English Common Law, all that rather ironic snarking from the country that pioneered the abusive plea bargain system.
The Caution read at arrest is actually shorter in the UK; it doesn't mention that the cautioned have a right to an attorney or one will be appointed for them. They do, but the duty sergeant at the police station tells them that when they are booked.
The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
Again, no, not just "in an investigation".
It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.
Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
Every researcher and product designer who leaned into this just has helped speedrun the world into a nasty place. But I guess I don’t have to type my passcode into my phone anymore!
So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).
Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.
It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.
If you restrict it to just those public cameras, London would barely be in the top 10 of USA cities in public cameras per capita.
Sure, it's not good, but implicit in many comments here is "I'm glad it's not that bad here" (presumably the USA for most commentors), but in reality it is happening "here", has been happening "here" for some time, and in many ways is already much worse "here" already.
While I think many of the UK's actions around this are massive mistake, certainly don't read me as supporting it, at least understand that the big headlines and pointing away from home towards "Orwellian UK" is a misleading distraction.
[0] https://www.get-licensed.co.uk/reports/cctv-cameras-in-the-u...
This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
But I pick Portugal's approach every time — no public cameras, no dashcams, it is forbidden to record private persons in public without permission.
The standard of driving and adherence to the law of the roads is some of the worst I’ve encountered in Europe.
I haven’t let go of my 9yo’s hand since we arrived in Porto a few days ago. Speeding is chronic and nobody gives a shit for the safety of you or your children here.
Talking about speeding, not sure. I am driving around Lisbon and speed limit is 50 in city, and lots of speed cameras. Though I am driving at 55 as limit and rarely see anyone going faster than that.
As sibling comments mention, countries exist with many cameras, public or private, where driving feels worse. I didn't look at road deaths, but I'd be surprised if Portugal is among the leading countries on this.
Equally, if you take a bit of distance, you can realise that Portugal has many other parents living there, yet they are not clamouring for more surveillance: it's difficult to imagine that the Portuguese dictatorial government is evilly preventing its people from accessing the benefits of surveillance.
Portugal: 58 Romania (highest in EU): 78 EU overall: 44 Sweden (lowest in EU): 20
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
So, depending on where OP is from, Portugal could seem a bit more dangerous or wildly more dangerous than their home county.
What I would like to see is something like this:
- The detectors have a per-determined list of suspect faces and only record information when those faces are spotted.
- These detectors keep only a fixed length of recording that is permanently deleted unless it is actively linked to a crime and explicitly held as part of that investigation.
But it says nothing concrete. Just some nonsense about "focus" which doesn't mean anything.
That IS the story though. The kind of offences these cameras disuade pale in comparison with the risk of abuse of power infringed in the 99.999% of innocent people these cameras are pointed at suppose.
Every society gets what they deserve at the end (which doesn't mean every individual, thats why its optimal to live in society that has similar core values and moral 'height' to not be constantly depressed from fellow citizens and their decisions ie in voting).
Maintaining freedom requires continuous effort that can be unpleasant, not giving up privacies 1 by 1 to get deep into / maintain undisturbed comfort zone. Laziness is one way to kill freedom.
Computer recognition has been around for a very long time, and has always been on the edge for spying on citizens.
It's accelerated now because we have future technology that they didn't have back then.
Those who in power of the state don't want to loose power. A protest, revolt is the best way to overthrow that. So to eliminate that threat is to survey. Install fear and you have control.
> The idea that emerged around the time of the French Revolution that the political spectrum can be divided into a right- and left wing in the first place – it becomes clear that the Left, in its essence, is a critique of bureaucracy, even if it’s one that has, again and again, been forced to accommodate itself in practice to the very bureaucratic structures and mindset it originally arose to oppose. [1]
[1] Computers and Surveillance Scandals in the 1960s-70s - https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03952774v1/document
Such wrongthink can't go unpunished.
BTP probably have a national live feed of railway station cameras. I bloody hope they do, considering it's a rather small, quite centralised police force that covers an enormous rail network, but they are known to have hired "super-recognisers" — skilled CCTV operators — instead.
We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations. (And the most long-term and persistent of those threats was Irish republican terrorism bankrolled by Americans, for that matter)
But British police generally simply don't have a fully-joined up surveillance system.
We are not tracked from door to door by police cameras; the police control relatively few even in London, and none in most towns. I probably cannot walk through the main part of town without passng a council CCTV camera because two of them are used to keep a pedestrianised road safe, but for the most part I don't think I'd pass one at all.
Councils have cameras for various things — parking and traffic enforcement is a nightmare in small old crowded towns — but police don't always have access to these, even.
(They do where I live because there are actually so few police that we — a town of sixty thousand people — nearly ended up without a police station at all.)
There's a network of traffic cameras on motorways and some urban A roads (traffic is a complex problem in the UK) and one assumes the security services have a feed of that and of the railway station cameras. Again: I want them to.
But we simply do not have and never have had a surveillance system even slightly as capable as the USA has apparently begun rolling out with Flock.
Generally speaking I worry that people outside the UK think the surveillance system in "Hot Fuzz" is real. Most of the time if the British police want to see CCTV footage they have to knock on doors and ask, just like anywhere else.
> We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations. (And the most long-term and persistent of those threats was Irish republican terrorism bankrolled by Americans, for that matter)
Did it ever cross Britain's mind that the whole IRA debacle is of its own doing? Can't you just leave Ireland for good and let them be?
That people still ask this question betrays only that they aren't well-informed about what actual issues led to the Troubles.
The negotiations and partition of Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a self-governing province (rather than being governed from Britain):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Ireland
And then the Troubles, which were a sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants within Northern Ireland itself, that stemmed from Protestant oppression of Catholic rights protests (patterned after the US civil rights movement). The Wikipedia pages are really good, but the top level page is great because it covers the early days so well:
Northern Ireland receives heavy subsidies from the UK government. I imagine the UK would be quite happy to cede it to the Republic of Ireland were this politically feasible and not likely to kick off another round of sectarian violence. Ireland may want the six counties in principle, but might be a little unhappy with the bill.
> We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations
I think your take might be based on myth and dramatisation too, as well as a misunderstanding of what the purpose of surveillance is (it's not about protecting children, or trains).
And agree with sibling about Ireland: the Troubles would have been solved by getting the hell out.
I invite you to check how the English government is reacting to independentist movements in Scotland and Ireland post-Brexit if you think they're happy to let people be.
You are arguing that terrorist attacks on public transport in the UK are mythical or dramatised?
> I invite you to check how the English government is reacting to independentist movements in Scotland and Ireland post-Brexit if you think they're happy to let people be.
This is just a very weird sentence to read; surprised it wasn't weird to write.
What kind of question is that? Did I ask you if you're calling cameras in the UK mythical?
Same as what you said about London, I'm arguing you're dramatising the dire threat of terrorism on the good people sitting in the tube.
In a thread where we're discussing the systematically verified risks of a slippery slope of surveillance measures and the introduction of extremely invasive surveillance in the tube, clutching your pearls about the mean terrorists threatening the public transports for literal generations is a ridiculous exaggeration that carries the same value as "think of the children". How are cameras going to protect you? Do you think they see people's intentions? Even the police didn't use the terrorism excuse for this.
Sorry for the tone, but this wilful misunderstanding of my comments and your statement about the Irish being to blame for the Troubles make it difficult to engage in a gentlemanly manner.
The threat has indeed been dire, and quite recently; the last jihadist bombing on the tube was less than ten years ago.
> Sorry for the tone,
I think you are not.
> your statement about the Irish being to blame for the Troubles
I did not say this.
The US has none of those laws at the federal level.
So what happens when using and optimising these systems becomes a priority for the state?
The apparatus is there, and capabilities can catch up to opportunities it presents.
Twice I nearly lost my father to terrorism in London. (Sliding Doors commuter moments both times — by sheer chance not being in the very usual place at the very usual time). I remain pretty relaxed about the idea that people who wish to bomb trains and tubes and buses can't get across London without the awareness that they could be tracked.
You cannot live your life paranoid, and while I think the evidence is clear that we need a small readjustment with the security state (as is evidenced by the BBC's extraordinary battle to get them to admit they lied to a court about a neonazi agent) I think it's better to understand that, yes, sometimes people are watching.
Better than the pretence that constitutional rights protect people they clearly do not protect, or that because the CIA or NSA promise not to do something, they aren't doing it.
I don't think there is any benefit in importing the paranoid style of US politics (R. Hofstadter) to the UK. And I think the weird breathless panic Americans have about London is their problem. We, living here, shouldn't choose to imagine it is true, when it isn't. London is safer than every comparable US city and transport policing is a big, big, big part of why. And if freedom-loving Americans have scared themselves too much to visit, I am not sure why we should care.
I don't know a single American that has ever expressed any sentiment that London is unsafe. I know a few that have some stupid notions about immigrants in the UK, but that isn't exclusive to people on this side of the pond.
Genuinely, though. Americans just don't worry about safety in London outside of scams and petty crime inherent to any big tourist city.
Anyways. Very few people die to terrorism. It's just a great excuse to take away people's freedom because they are scared.
Agree! Life is so much better.
> Twice I nearly lost my father to terrorism in London.
Oh. You just don’t know the definition of the word “paranoia”.
but I agree being stabbed should be legal for victim /s
Britain has all sorts of laws like "attempting to pervert the course of justice", so you'd have to be very careful to not accidentally cover for a "real criminal", but just to preserve privacy it might work (especially if more than one person did so).
I've never had the guts to do it, but I do really hate facial recognition and all of this surveillance capitalism.
The UK doesn't value liberty for liberty's sake like the US does. In the US there seems to be this notion that freedom is a universal good, where as in the UK people are quite comfortable with liberties being revoked if it means they feel safer or fewer people are doing things they don't like.
UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next – loud fireworks, energy drinks, smoking, gambling, porn, not wearing headphones on public transport, praying for people having abortions, etc.
While this tech will obviously be used to clamp down on protests that are inconvenient to the government (as we've seen happen with protests in recent UK history), even these measures tend to be popular in the UK. Most protest groups are net-unpopular, therefore any movement the government makes to crack down on say Palestine protests, climate protests or immigration protests, are fairly popular here.
Imo the UK was accidentally a liberal country post-WWII to the early 1990s because of influence from the US, but culturally the UK isn't liberal and never was. We're a very socially conservative country and take a natural dislike to anyone who rocks the boat a little.
These new digital surveillance techniques are very much in line with British cultural conservatism, and follow a long history of UK mass surveillance.
As a Brit who inhabits the US desire for freedom I genuinely struggle to relate to Brits and it always makes me feel less insane when I come on here and find other people who value liberty too. But in my real life, I think I've genuinely only ever met one Brit who has shared my desire for freedom.
This is probably the difference.
Here's a video of a leading UK MP (whose party largely represents upper-middle class white-Brits) reacing to someone doing something he doesn't like on public transport:
https://www.facebook.com/libdems/videos/stop-the-headphone-d...
Note the passivate aggression, then the threat to use state force to stop it.
British people are too polite to tell people to stop doing things. We prefer that to be a responsibility of the police.
The UK is banning gambling? Really?
On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.
Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.
the UK is not the US ;)
Oh wait, this came out just yesterday:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/10/detective-respon...
but we have a totally different approach to policing, which is what i was actually meaning https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56834733
> The report looked at police training requirements in more than 100 countries and found that the US had among the lowest, in terms of average hours required.
> Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma.
This same argument would apply to Flock cameras, correct?
i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.
so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.
there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.
ps: great initiative by LU
It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.
The amount of recent cases in the US is enough for me to not place any faith in the fact that this system would not be abused.
There are also cases where law enforcement misuses this sort of technology to stalk romantic interests. So your kids could very well be stalked by a pervert in law enforcement more effectively with this technology.
Living in the UK is fantastic.
They became the very thing they called the enemy of their own citizens
The irony..
Begs the question: what's next?
It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
Looking forward to seeing the singnage there.
So what is the point ?
We desperately need utopian futures but seem to be getting only dystopias regardless of origin state and nominal political ideology: almost as if 1984, Animal Farm, Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Terminator, and THX 1138 had a Waterworld-Mad Max setting.
We should each try to imagine a technology-enabled future utopia and build an enabling technology instead of contributing to this sort of thing - which already exists in most countries not to mention financial surveillance, internet surveillance, mobile phone surveillance, vehicle and commercial flight/ship surveillance.
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
The problems we have are much deeper though. Petty crime is out of control and it's impacting society in obvious ways. Just go to a shop to see the measures they have to take to try to reduce theft. We don't have enough police due to a decade or two of underfunding. And even if we did we don't have enough prison space to even let harder criminals finish out their sentences - so what's the point in arresting petty criminals?
Saying that London is still one of the safest major cities in the world. Safer than any major US city. I've been living here a long time and the worst I've seen is a few phone thefts. I can walk pretty much anywhere safely at any time of the day or night. Don't let the fear mongering online fool you.
They also don't arrest for internet memes.
Just saying.
I went to Victoria station where they were doing this yesterday and the police seemed quite unhappy with me taking photos of them operating the facial recognition station and confronted me almost immediately. The irony...
The area they were doing it in was completely swarming with far more police officers than usual, supposedly to "provide information".
I had expected to see signs all around the station warning passengers that this trial was taking place, but the only ones I saw were directly in that area or by the stairs as you're walking down into it. They weren't small enough that I could characterise them as intentionally hard-to-miss, but I reckon with the amount of traffic going down that staircase, the overwhelming majority of people would not have actually been aware that they were being subject to this LFR trial. I didn't see a single person other than myself pausing to read the signs.
Edit: There also wasn't a single sign inside the gateline where you'd tap out and walk into the area that the camera station was pointing at. I asked the police why this was, and they claimed it was because the cameras are only positioned to capture people entering the station, not exiting. Maybe that's true, as long as you don't turn around at any point? I'm not convinced.