I really don't understand why they do trials for this. What would be the failure case for the trial? "We carried out the trial for 6 weeks over X period of time, we arrested Y people, at that rate we've decided this is not compatible with modern liberal democracy, we would've traded a free society for Y+2 arrests over X period but we just didn't quite get there"?
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.
If I were to guess, they may have some "test" users (people who are involved in this) who are on the watchlist, they do their regular commutes and see if the system picks them up each time.
For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.
It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.
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.
Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly.
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!"
All due respect but I am not totally against police dealing with protests. I am against this Orwellian surveillance stuff. If you want to police so people can deal with day to day things like go shopping without being harassed or freaked out I am all for that. But do it the old fashioned way.
The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.
These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes)
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
How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view.
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.
Identify attendees and key figures from social media → pick them up when detected on public transport.
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.
Facial recognition could be used to identify people who are likely to participate in protests and prevent them from doing so in advance by intercepting them at their boarding station or somewhere near it. You could also scan for persons arriving in a city where a protest might be plannend and arrest them beforehand.
As with your sibling comment, what you’re describing is theoretically possible, but it’s also more difficult and resource intensive than the simple dumb alternative of blocking off the area of the planned protest and putting some police officers outside nearby tube stations to arrest anyone who’s clearly intending to head to the protest.
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.
What would be grounds for arresting someone at the tube stations? Is it illegal in the UK for police to believe you intend to go a certain area based on how you exit the tube?
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.
Brazil was so right. We're just an inference away from being jailed. I'm not from UK but it shows how we are all helpless and see in plain conciousness what is coming. When did we lost the grip?
The 1960's is about the time when investment went in to surveillance programs it's been a downhill slope since then but now just accelerated because we have future technology.
“Our deployments are intelligence-led and focused on identifying people wanted by the police or courts, including those suspected of serious offences and those who may be breaching bail conditions or court orders”
This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
This is exactly what happened in Moscow after same tech was launched. It is much 'safer' on streets, since every entrance door and traffic intersection is equipped with cameras now.
But I pick Portugal's approach every time — no public cameras, no dashcams, it is forbidden to record private persons in public without permission.
I love the word "including" there. Yes it will be used for people suspected of minor crimes but it also includes people accused serious crimes as well!
They're hoping people read this as the nonsense notion that they'll only scan criminal's faces. Reality is that everyone's face will be scanned, processed and stored.
Not really related to the written topic of this page, but I noticed there is a sideways red button with "Leave this site" that redirects you to 'https://www.google.co.uk/'. What could be the incentive behind this? Why not just close the tab?
The concept of the UK "surveillance state" is actually quite overcooked. It's largely based on myth and dramatisation.
BTP probably have a national live feed of railway station cameras.
I bloody hope they do, considering it's a centralised police force that covers an enormous rail network but they are known to have hired "super-recognisers" 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 (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.
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.
I assume they were always doing it. Now they're doing it above the table so that they can comb through the dataset for petty reasons that don't justify the expense of parallel construction.
Police have been using it in London for several years, mostly at protests, but also in other 'test' deployments. They are currently required (it seems) to place signage around the catchment area to notify the public that facial recognition is in progress. Private companies may well have been using it for longer in their shops without having to notify anyone. Sainsbury's, for instance, quickly attracted suspicion that they were doing trials of it at certain locations.
i'm pretty sure the majority learned plenty well. But that's not whose in charge is it. Even in democracy, especially in America, it's the billionaires and puritans making these choices.
This is the country that can´t stop dingy boats...this despite journalists always being able to be there on time to take pictures for the Daily Mail...
For what it's worth, as a Brit, I assure you no one cares about this, and it's likely that most people, if asked, would support it.
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.
I can't speak to other nations, but given the present issues in Britain with two tier policing, they will receive a religious exemption. Which may result in everyone wearing a hijab just for privacy.
Technology that began in the private sector, retailers using facial recognition technology to profile customers, has now bled over violently into public life. I strongly believe in the right to be forgotten, and I strongly believe in the right to be peacefully invisible. No flock cameras. No facial recognition cameras. The intrusion and dangers are too great against any benefit.
It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
BTP probably have a national live feed of railway station cameras.
I bloody hope they do, considering it's a centralised police force that covers an enormous rail network but they are known to have hired "super-recognisers" 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 (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.
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.
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.
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.