> Live facial recognition will scan the faces of those heading to the “Unite the Kingdom, Unite the West” rally in the borough of Camden, marking the first time the technology has been authorized for use at a protest in the UK. The rally was organized by activist Tommy Robinson who says the rally is for “national unity, free speech and Christian values.”

Let's have a look at Tommy Robinson's Wikipedia article*:

> Robinson has a history of criminal convictions,[5] including for crimes such as assault,[6] threats,[7] harassment,[8] and fraud,[5] as well as contempt of court rulings relating to his videos, and has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025. In June 2022, Robinson said that he lost £100,000 in gambling before declaring bankruptcy in March 2021. He also said he owed an estimated £160,000 to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In August 2024, The Times said that he owed in the region of £2 million to his creditors, and was the subject of a HMRC investigation over unpaid taxes.

The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot, and have planned accordingly. British police forces have a long-established procedure for collecting CCTV evidence during riots, and then using that to prosecute rioters afterwards.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson

I'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?

• krisbolton

  today at 9:51 PM

  Did that risk materialise? I suppose it would be only the same as credit cards. With a valid warrant authorities can gain access to information. But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament. I'm more concerned about ensuring the legal powers are checked and balanced, and stay that way.

  • like_any_other

    today at 10:05 PM

    Warrants aren't all you think they are (this is for the USA, but the UK is not exactly a beacon of liberty in comparison, so I doubt it's much better): https://web.archive.org/web/20140718122350/https://www.popeh...

    > But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament.

    Ah well if it's an elected government then the risk of it turning hostile to its people is zero, of course!

    And ask "did that risk materialize?" to the people in China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Belarus, or Germany [1], or USA [2]. There are countless examples of the dangers of surveillance, in the present and in history - you don't need a specific example of exactly Oyster cards being used, to know they are a danger.

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/german...

    [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-administration-argues-it-ca...

• dgellow

  today at 9:38 PM

  I’m sure we can find a better anecdote than a bike being stolen…

• unethical_ban

  today at 9:39 PM

  Omniscient government surveillance in practice will be of far more use for harassment and suppressing political dissent than it ever will be used for the public good.

Perhaps 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...

• croisillon

  today at 9:37 PM

  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. 
  

  so she was 16 when she "disappeared" (how, where, sleeping in the streets?) and the camera can link a 16 y.o. face to a 36 y.o. one after probably rough years?

• suburban_strike

  today at 9:57 PM

  This is a bit of an oversell on their part. The offenses include:

  > 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.

  > A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.

  > A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.

  > 37 arrests for breaches of court‑imposed conditions

  > Darame was found to be in breach of tag conditions, in relation to an intentional strangulation and two counts of assault on an emergency worker on Monday, 8 September 2025 and arrested.

  > Kastriot Krrashi, 35, of Dingwall Road, Croydon, was stopped by officers for being wanted on suspicion of breaching his conditions as a registered sex offender.

  > Neville Cohen, 55 (25.05.1970) of no fixed address, was stopped by officers for being wanted for failing to comply with a condition on a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) which required him to attend Croydon Police Station in October 2025.

  These are all pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of these are misdemeanors. None rise to the level of murder. None are "persons of interest." This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans. Great job, UK-- fish are quite easy to catch once you've tagged them.

  The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement. He went on to commit the deadliest terrorist attack in British history: 22 dead, 1000+ injured. The cameras would not have done anything everyone in a position to intervene refused to do. He wasn't a wanted criminal until after he was vaporized by his own bomb.

  It doesn't matter what your politics are, if you let the state become this efficient at catching people for offenses are minor as "failure to appear," god help you if you ever turn whistleblower. They'll spend every resource tracking you down, but that stranger you were talking to before your "suicide" will never be found. No public or private agency should have this much power.

OK, London Police, how about doing the same with the recurring 'pro-Palestine' manifestations? If the goal is to catch 'suspects' there's sure to be ripe pickings awaiting those face-scanning drones.

I won't hold my breath for them to do something like this given the record of 'two-tier justice' in the UK, a record which launched people like 'Tommy Robinson' (a pseudonym hence the quotes) into the spotlight and which may well be the final push 'Reform' needs to become 'first past the goal posts' in the next election. For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

Wow, 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?

• KaiserPro

  today at 10:18 PM

  > this is a Reform UK event

  No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.

  I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.

  However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.

• 1shooner

  today at 9:11 PM

  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.

  • suburban_strike

    today at 9:27 PM

    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.

  • stavros

    today at 9:13 PM

    Right, but suspects of what? Just in general, all the crimes they know about?

    • futter9

      today at 9:18 PM

      Maybe one of them has quoted crime or immigration statistics on social media and must therefore be imprisoned.

• hactually

  today at 8:56 PM

  Must be some heinous crimes to enable dragnet surveillance. That or the rotten state of Britain really is trying anything from splitting at the seams.

  Must be the heinous crime thing tho.

  • philipallstar

    today at 9:17 PM

    Its definitely not heinous crimes. It's just recording people at events to know who's of what political persuasion.

• NooneAtAll3

  today at 9:34 PM

  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

• conradludgate

  today at 9:22 PM

  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.

  • stavros

    today at 9:31 PM

    Sure, but there's a difference between surveillance after a crime vs before.

• graemep

  today at 9:50 PM

  No, nothing to do with Reform. Organised by Tommy Robinson. The guy Reform think is such a nutcase that they turned down a huge donation from Elon Musk because Elon made it conditional on letting Robinson join Reform.

  Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.

  • hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

    today at 10:00 PM

    To Reforms credit while I do think they started off as a bit of a looney party that relied on theatrics they managed to evolve into a more mature party ever since Zia Yusuf joined and you see how the tone of Nigel Farage has already become more serious. To some that will look like they became "Conservatives 2.0" but I don't think we have another real conservative party left anyway.

• rolph

  today at 9:07 PM

  facial recognition is old news, the development of intent prediction is the edge.

• baal80spam

  today at 9:02 PM

  Thought crime, obviously!

The UK is one of the most effective and longest running surveillance states so this should not be a surprise to anyone.

• Joker_vD

  today at 9:42 PM

  Well, Orwell wrote about what he knew.

• KaiserPro

  today at 10:19 PM

  > most effective

  I mean its not. Plus with the court backlogs rising, the chances of you getting convicted are rapidly diminishing

• Leonard_of_Q

  today at 10:15 PM

  Whether they're 'effective' is unclear but that this has been a long-growing trend is clear and with that I wonder why this post was downvoted.

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