The UK is one of the most effective and longest running surveillance states so this should not be a surprise to anyone.
London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
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Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#12Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well. The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
It's worth stating that historically these right-wing culture protests have been a bit more violent in nature than most protests are. I'm not suggesting that everyone in the protest is violent, but there's enough mob mentality that makes me (someone who lives in London) uncomfortable.
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#13Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well. The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
I don't personally support this surveillance, but that isn't what the articles says. It says they will be "scanning for suspects from above." And later quotes the Met making reference to 'intelligence'. So conceivably they could have information about the plans of specific individuals at this event.
It doesn't matter what the article says. There is no penalty for lying and no incentive to be honest. The media exists to broadcast their lies at scale.
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#14I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.
What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#15Perhaps it will be the first protest where FR is used, but the first pilot (which ended in March) just put 2 FR cameras on a street in Croydon and they arrested "170 wanted criminals" in 6 months.
https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#16[deleted]
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#17Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well. The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
It's worth stating that historically these right-wing culture protests have been a bit more violent in nature than most protests are. I'm not suggesting that everyone in the protest is violent, but there's enough mob mentality that makes me (someone who lives in London) uncomfortable.
Sure, but there's a difference between surveillance after a crime vs before.
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#18Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well. The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
if protest expects confrontation (for either side reasons), it's possible for roads to be preemptively de-surfaced to get stones to throw at police
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#19Perhaps it will be the first protest where FR is used, but the first pilot (which ended in March) just put 2 FR cameras on a street in Croydon and they arrested "170 wanted criminals" in 6 months. https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...
wondering about that line:
A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
Re: London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time
#20I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where. What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to fin…
I’m sure we can find a better anecdote than a bike being stolen…