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.

• sarjann

  today at 10:38 AM

  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.

• jambalaya8

  today at 10:30 AM

  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.

• steve_gh

  today at 10:47 AM

  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.

  • ExoticPearTree

    today at 10:58 AM

    The UK stopped being a democracy a long time ago.

    In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.

    • steve_gh

      today at 11:13 AM

      How does that make us not a democracy? You are confusing the constitutionally based US system with the parliamentary based UK system. They work differently. We have elections typically every 4-5 years and elect a new government. That's the democracy bit. The laws that our elected representatives make are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But they are made by the people we elected.

    • _fw

      today at 11:02 AM

      You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.

      The only realistic protection here is a “false door” as presented by GrapheneOS in that recent story. A partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS that gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.

• CommanderData

  today at 11:05 AM

  They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.

• fragmede

  today at 10:43 AM

  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.

  • raverbashing

    today at 10:48 AM

    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

• gspr

  today at 10:49 AM

  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!"

  • _fw

    today at 11:04 AM

    There’s also transparency theatre here. “If it WAS part of a nefarious system, surely we wouldn’t be talking about it so openly?”

    It’s especially disappointing when the entire system is foiled by the balaclavas worn by so many of the country’s criminals every day anyway.

• foldr

  today at 10:31 AM

  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.

  • notRobot

    today at 10:37 AM

    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.

  • brettermeier

    today at 10:36 AM

    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.

    • foldr

      today at 10:42 AM

      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.

      • _heimdall

        today at 10:49 AM

        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?

        • dofm

          today at 10:59 AM

          It's not about grounds to arrest them.

          It's practicality.

          If you need to arrest someone in London (someone who might be about to cause harm) then there's a very good chance they will go through a tube station, and they tend to have relatively few, easily controlled exits. Most tube stations have two or less.

          A few high profile tube stations occasionally have armed police presence.

          But I think the idea that face recognition is being used to suppress protest is pretty overcooked; apart from the utter silliness around the banning of Palestine Action, we have a solid right to protest and we do.

          The main problem is London has far too few police officers, and it has a transport system that is under consistent terror threat.

        • foldr

          today at 11:04 AM

          Same grounds as for arresting them anywhere else, more or less. I am not saying that the police should ban protests (and they generally don’t). I’m just talking about the practicalities of how they could go about doing it.

The UK already has so much CCTV. Some believe it reduces drug-related, vehicle, and property crime, but most agree is has virtually no effect on violent crime (https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolk...).

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.

The surveillance of China without the prosperity or safety. At least in China I can leave my bag or laptop out of sight for a moment, same cannot be said of my home city of London.

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?

• coldtea

  today at 10:39 AM

  Note to readers: Brazil the Terry Gilliam Kafkaesque movie, not the country.

• Nursie

  today at 11:00 AM

  Brazil was also right about the levels of competence within the bureaucracy.

• doublerabbit

  today at 10:38 AM

  The 1960's was about the time in history when investment went in to surveillance programs.

  Computer recognition has been around for a very long time, and has always been on the edge for spying on citizens.

  It's accelerated now because we have future technology that they didn't have back then.

“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.

• dandaka

  today at 10:30 AM

  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.

  • danw1979

    today at 11:17 AM

    I’m in Portugal with kids right now and I can not think of a country where dashcams would be more useful.

    The standard of driving and adherence to the law of the roads is some of the worst I’ve encountered in Europe.

    I haven’t let go of my 9yo’s hand since we arrived in Porto a few days ago. Speeding is chronic and nobody gives a shit for the safety of you or your children here.

• zarzavat

  today at 10:36 AM

  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!

• throwayay4929

  today at 10:20 AM

  Could easily be used to track people who posted something bad on Twitter.

• Schiendelman

  today at 10:18 AM

  Could? Will.

• caarven

  today at 10:46 AM

  "Could"? Have you seen what they've been doing to protesters?

• altacc

  today at 10:37 AM

  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.

Putting aside the social and legal implications of this trial, I find it very interesting how projects like this are often trumpeted to be successful and celebrated at launch (rather than when proven to work, or save costs or whatever) as though the hard bit was actually wading for months or years through several government and private IT bureaucracies, not making a system that delivers what it promises.

It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.

I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.

I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.

I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.

Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.

Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.

Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.

Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.

History has taught us that before.

We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.

• windowliker

  today at 11:16 AM

  Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.

  I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.

  As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been conned into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.

• dofm

  today at 11:01 AM

  > Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

  Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.

  • _fw

    today at 11:14 AM

    There’s a specific GDPR carve out as outlined by the ICO here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

    I don’t have evidence that shows specific examples of where it happens, but the state apparatus for it to do so exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that it is happening on a daily basis.

    • dofm

      today at 11:19 AM

      That does not at all suggest that UK ISPs proactively share anything with the state.

      What it means is the GDPR doesn't stop ISPs choosing to share when asked, rather than waiting for the warranted request that will come, as long as there is a lawful basis.

      Again: I don't really have a problem with that.

The way things keep devolving in Britain, the easiest path is to force everyone to wear a camera on their chest like the police do. Then you can arrest people who don't wear them because surely they have something to hide.

21st century authoritarianism. Humans learned nothing from the 20th century.

• s5ma6n

  today at 10:33 AM

  I'd argue that they actually learned it well, that's why we see anti-privacy stuff like this and Chat Control.

• christophilus

  today at 10:41 AM

  I just went through airport security. It’s been coming a long time. 2001 made a lot of people in the US, at least, normalize big brother.

• zombot

  today at 10:38 AM

  Worse, the children of the hippies have become reactionary bigots.

• cyanydeez

  today at 10:15 AM

  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.

  • pkul

    today at 10:44 AM

    Puritans?

    • sheauwn

      today at 11:11 AM

      They are likely referring to religious fundamentalists, mostly evangelical Christians. Puritans is a reference to an older christian fundamentalist group in the US that now have a connotation as extreme in their views.

• root-parent

  today at 9:50 AM

  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...

  • codeduck

    today at 10:36 AM

    All right, mate, let's hear your plan for securing the UK's south-eastern coastline.

    • Grum9

      today at 11:11 AM

      [dead]

They weren't? That's more surprising given the UK surveillance state.

• dofm

  today at 10:49 AM

  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" — skilled CCTV operators — 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 on motorways and some urban A roads (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. Again: I want them to.

  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.

  • _fw

    today at 10:59 AM

    This is a mature and considered take. But I’m sure you’ll agree: incompetence is not a reliable defence.

    So what happens when using and optimising these systems becomes a priority for the state?

    The apparatus is there, and capabilities can catch up to opportunities it presents.

    • dofm

      today at 11:05 AM

      I have to tell you I am not that bothered.

      Twice I nearly lost my father to terrorism in London. (Sliding Doors commuter moments both times — by sheer chance not being in the very usual place at the very usual time). I remain pretty relaxed about the idea that people who wish to bomb trains and tubes and buses can't get across London without the awareness that they could be tracked.

      You cannot live your life paranoid, and while I think the evidence is clear that we need a small readjustment with the security state (as is evidenced by the BBC's extraordinary battle to get them to admit they lied to a court about a neonazi agent) I think it's better to understand that, yes, sometimes people are watching.

      Better than the pretence that constitutional rights protect people they clearly do not protect, or that because the CIA or NSA promise not to do something, they aren't doing it.

      I don't think there is any benefit in importing the paranoid style of US politics (R. Hofstadter) to the UK. And I think the weird breathless panic Americans have about London is their problem: we shouldn't choose to imagine it is true, when it isn't. London is safer than every comparable US city and transport policing is a big, big, big part of why.

• cucumber3732842

  today at 10:28 AM

  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.

  • windowliker

    today at 10:48 AM

    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.

    • dofm

      today at 10:53 AM

      Sainsbury's and B&M and a couple of others use Facewatch, I think.

      A very badly run system, but alas no better or worse than USA stores and malls are doing.

Lest they commit the offense of buying a baseball bat or being stabbed?

• Markoff

  today at 11:11 AM

  TBH wrapped baseball bat is still a baseball bat, just because it's wrapped it doesn't mean you can't use it plus the beginning of the video was missing and it was clearly during some protest

  but I agree being stabbed should be legal for victim /s

Oi, you have a loicense for that mate?

I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.

police have been running facial recognition at london protests for years already. so is this just making it official?

How will this handle face masks? Hijabs or Niqabs?

• bobim

  today at 10:35 AM

  Direct classification as bad actor with bad intentions.

  • gib444

    today at 10:57 AM

    For one of the three yup

• Simulacra

  today at 10:41 AM

  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.

  • siliconpotato

    today at 11:12 AM

    baseball cap and sunglasses will do just fine.

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?

> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available

So what is the point ?

> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available

Looking forward to seeing the singnage there.

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.

This must be especially inconvenient for those with criminal physiognomy.

• DaSHacka

  today at 10:25 AM

  Or really, in the anarcho-tyrannistic structures Western countries have turned into, those who don't.

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.

Fascist monarchy has facist policies shocker. So glad I left that hell hole.

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