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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

#231

Post by varenc »

burkaman wrote: post #67
mrtksn wrote: post #56

It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state. Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations tha…

Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.

> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request.

These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.

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

#232

Post by JonChesterfield »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #120
spwa4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.

That is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.

Or that when they fail, they get left up anyway

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

#233

Post by stavros »

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).

It does sound terrifying that arrests for terrorism have skyrocketed lately, given that I'm pretty sure that it's neither the case that the number of terrorists has skyrocketed lately, nor the ability of the police to catch terrorists.

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

#234

Post by anonymousDan »

jon-wood wrote: post #44
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...

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…

I don't think this is true. Apparently the operation of a large majority of those private cameras is in fact outsourced to a handful of big security companies, and many of them are remotely operated. This makes getting access to private cameras a lot easier for police than you think.

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

#235

Post by wkat4242 »

dingnuts wrote: post #218
tehjoker wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's a war, not a genocide. Gaza is under seige. Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender. Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950? No, defense of Israel is the last stand of a people that has been slowly eradicated from their indigenous region for the la…

> Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?

Maybe they were genocides too. I don't know enough about them. The holocaust certainly was a genocide. Yes.

But one genocide doesn't justify another. That's the thing.

Even what Hamas did (terrible as it was) doesn't justify all the dead civilians, withholding food, shooting at food pickup points etc.

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

#236

Post by J_McQuade »

xg15 wrote: post #224
dingnuts wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a war, not a genocide. Gaza is under seige. Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender. Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950? No, defense of Israel is the last stand of a people that has been slowly eradicated from their indigenous region for the la…

[flagged]

It's only genocide if it happened in Europe in the 20th Century - otherwise it's just a sparkling ethnic-cleansing.

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

#237

Post by zdragnar »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #222
dingnuts wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a war, not a genocide. Gaza is under seige. Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender. Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950? No, defense of Israel is the last stand of a people that has been slowly eradicated from their indigenous region for the la…

Israel needs to open it's borders and embrace multi-culturalism.

"Death to Israel" is not a culture. The surrounding countries don't care about Palestinians or Israelis.

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

#238

Post by gerdesj »

oliyoung wrote: post #209
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?

Quickly? London is one of the most CCTV covered cities in the world, and has been since the 70s As shocking as this is, it's not _surprising_

That probably is true by some measure. There are a lot of cameras in the UK - rather more than when I was a nipper!

I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).

I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.

It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.

My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.

Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.

Are you a local?

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

#239

Post by jameslk »

mrtksn wrote: post #56

It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state. Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations tha…

This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there

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

#240

Post by kypro »

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).

You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.

Obligatory legal notice that I obviously do not support said group, but historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objectives. N one I've spoken to feels even remotely terrorised by Palestine Action, and it wouldn't even make sense to be given what they stand for.

I say this as someone who neither supports Palestine Action or shares their concerns.

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