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Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

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Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#131

Post by varispeed »

lenerdenator wrote: post #46
Shank wrote: post #22

The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?

Well, China got away with it. More than got away with it, actually... they prospered. There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.

This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#132

Post by dragonwriter »

varispeed wrote: post #131
lenerdenator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, China got away with it. More than got away with it, actually... they prospered. There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.

This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state t…

> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,

Why would we work down the prosperity chain?

There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.

Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#133

Post by tharmas »

orra wrote: post #115
elric wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember. Must be a truly dangerous place... https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...

> Must be a truly dangerous place... I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK. Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).

Its Orwellian.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#134

Post by southernplaces7 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #89
southernplaces7 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the…

You raise a good point that if the system wrongly ID you once it means that you're probably liable to be flagged every time you walk past one of those vans...

I think it's almost inevitable. The very nature of the bureaucratic procedures that grow up around these sorts of flag lists is that effort tends to accumulate at those points, right or wrong, and your being listed on them becomes almost self-reinforcing through bureaucratic inertia and over-caution, mixed with laziness about investigating if their own systems are wrong and repairing the problem.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#135

Post by tharmas »

DrBazza wrote: post #118
jon-wood wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage…

There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?

>if you have nothing to hide

But it's not you that decides that what you are doing is harmless. It's what the authorities decide; and that can be quite different from what you or other people deem "nothing to hide".

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#136

Post by dathinab »

DrBazza wrote: post #118
jon-wood wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage…

There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?

> It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?

because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys

there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)

like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay

or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it

and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).

And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.

and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?

anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#137

Post by JFingleton »

dathinab wrote: post #121
Shank wrote: post #22

The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?

> The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc." > Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things? no, and it also has a long track record of not onl…

> EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."

And yet they are still pushing [0]

[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#138

Post by potato3732842 »

aaronbaugher wrote: post #124
codedokode wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The surveillance is there not to catch small thieves, but those who are against the government, against wars etc. A small thief doesn't threaten the regime in any way so he can be dealt with after more dangerous people are dealt with.

In fact, the petty criminal may benefit the regime, if his crimes damage those the regime sees as a greater threat to itself and its goals.

The petty thief causes the useful idiots to clamor for more dragnet.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#139

Post by dathinab »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #55
Shank wrote: post #22

The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?

Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other. For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglect…

This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.

The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.

In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#140

Post by tharmas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #132
varispeed wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state t…

> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, Why would we work down the prosperity chain? There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies. Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the…

>financing/services dominant economies

But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation. Building a Feudal Economy.

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