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.
A very badly run system, but alas no better or worse than USA stores and malls are doing.
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.
Looking forward to seeing the singnage 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.
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.
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.
It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
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 already easy for the police to prevent protests in a practical sense. It’s a political and legal issue more than a technical one.
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.
For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.
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
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!"
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