The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
The first time I taught, it was a rather interesting experience realizing how little capacity teachers actually have to deal with e.g. a disruptive student. Yeah you can pass them along to the disciplinarian or whatever, but in the end it's often empty threats - especially if the parents themselves don't particularly care, which in the case of highly disruptive students is nearly always the case. But if a class itself, or even a significant minority of a class, simply chose to stop cooperating - there's not much of anything anyone could do about it.
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
I was taking an intercity coach to Glasgow recently and a teenage kid was on his phone browsing social media without headphones. I made a comment that he should use headphones or turn the volume off. He got defensive and angry. I did not to escalate, and put my earplugs on.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
> The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
No, it is more like UK is now the new surveillance supermarket for EU: implementing what “works” for UK - trusted and applied technology.
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
I hope I’m not adding 2 + 2 to get 5, but it’s incredibly convenient that a lot of people are being charged for supporting a proscribed group the same month as the online safety act is rolled out…
The cynic in me almost wonders if when it comes to re-election time, these increased numbers in terrorist charges will be trotted out and the context conveniently forgotten.
It does sound terrifying that arrests for terrorism have skyrocketed lately, given that I'm pretty sure that it's neither the case that the number of terrorists has skyrocketed lately, nor the ability of the police to catch terrorists.
You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.
Obligatory legal notice that I obviously do not support said group, but historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objectives. N one I've spoken to feels even remotely terrorised by Palestine Action, and it wouldn't even make sense to be given what they stand for.
I say this as someone who neither supports Palestine Action or shares their concerns.
Even more chilling when you find out that sentences for previous criminals are being commuted and reduced significantly for heinous crimes (theft, burglary, rape, assault, etc.), so as to clear space and make room in prisons to accommodate these "terrorists".
The more dangerous people they can get on the street the more fear they can generate and the more they can whip the public to their bidding. Getting rid of the few people trying educate the public on these matters goes hand in hand.
It still arguably complies with the Paradox of Tolerance.
Terrorists (as well as their supporters) are intolerant and non-pluralist. Therefore, for a pluralist society to survive, it must be intolerant of one thing- intolerance.
The paradox of tolerance isn't wrong, but it's also invoked awfully quickly in the last years, often by people who weren't tolerant to begin with.
I'd at least like to know who defines who is a "Pluralist" and who is a "Terrorist".
Also: The paradox of tolerance can legitimately be used to call intolerant behaviors of individuals. When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
To be sure, in the original context of Popper's writing, I believe "intolerant" meant something like "committing violence against others for disagreeing with you", and "tolerate" meant "refrain from intolerance". The full quote is below:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;
Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way to force. If he was only talking about force in response to force it wouldn't be considered a paradox I don't think. This quote hasn't dispeled popular characterizations of his stance for me, it seems in line with what most people say he's saying.
As you say, it's because the speech may later give way to force. It does go farther than American free speech law permits: the latter draws the line at something like "threats of immediate criminal action", whereas this would attack "propagating ideologies that one thinks will eventually lead the followers to criminal action". There are certainly deep problems with potential implementation here: e.g. the main American political parties would probably both accuse each other's ideology of eventually leading the followers to criminal action. One would want high standards for that (of, say, what percentage engage in what magnitude of criminal action; as well as evidentiary standards), and want it to be established in a mega-trial, or by a supermajority of Congress declaring war on an ideology; and even that might not be enough. I'm not necessarily in favor of Popper's approach, except in emergencies.
However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
But with the smaller space for the population, it's nearly total coverage from multiple angles vs the wide distances separating the equivalent number of cameras in the US.
The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage already.
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
I don't think this is true. Apparently the operation of a large majority of those private cameras is in fact outsourced to a handful of big security companies, and many of them are remotely operated. This makes getting access to private cameras a lot easier for police than you think.
There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
> It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys
there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)
like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it
and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).
And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.
and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?
anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
But it's not you that decides that what you are doing is harmless. It's what the authorities decide; and that can be quite different from what you or other people deem "nothing to hide".
You're mixing your definitions of authoritarian, there's authoritarian in the 'Nolan chart' sense of the word, which just means 'not a Libertarian', which is like 98% of people, which is different to the Hitler meaning of authoritarian, which means 'rejecting democracy'. If the people agree to ban things they don't like, that's democracy, so it's the Nolan kind of authoritarian but not the Hitler kind of authoritarian. Deciding the people shouldn't be allowed to agree collectively to ban certain things is rejecting democracy, so it's Hitler authoritarian but not Nolan authoritarian.
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other.
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
The 2 best surveillance methods for crime investigation are LPR Cameras and cashless public transport.
Both of them then rely on the next step after providing information, following the people who triggered the first layer with CCTV.
If I went into my local CBD right now, and comitted some badass crime. explode a cop car or something we all yearn to do. All the exits are covered. I wont get anywhere walking and covering my face. I can get on a train but the rozzers will know where I get off. Likewise, if I jump in a car, they can track it almost anywhere for the next 100 kilometers.
I dont think the goal is prevention, its the guaranteed catch. Its the body of evidence that starts piling up when you burn cop car 1.
When brisbane introduced the go card system, we had our first arrest based on go card travel data within a month.
Sad really.
>bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
I helped an employer comply like this once. Someone had been brutally killed by a driver. The victim only existed for like 3 frames on the recording. But the cop wasnt interested in that anyway. They had managed to sneak drugs out of their car, into their pocket and then hide them in our garden, mid arrest. Embarrasing for the cop you see. The cop already had the driver on vehicular manslaughter, but thanks to the power of CCTV, they could also add a charge for drug crimes.
Even if you have a "good" government that goodness will make it a target for those who seek to co-opt it as a means to their desired end, and their desired ends are never good because if they were they would pursue cheaper less circuitous paths to them.
I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.
All the recent policy, technical leaps, and innovation around policing seem to be focused on cracking down on protesting and speech, and not really on what people would consider "fighting crime". You could get mugged on the street corner in broad daylight (or worse) and the police won't even answer your phone call, but the minute you show up on that street corner with 10 friends carrying signs and shouting, 20 officers will show up in riot gear, and every one of you will be identified using technology.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Nope. That's an ideology, not a statement of fact. It completely negates the possibility that systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose.
The surveillance is there not to catch small thieves, but those who are against the government, against wars etc. A small thief doesn't threaten the regime in any way so he can be dealt with after more dangerous people are dealt with.
This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
And so it's just a bill away from the data is suddenly being available for any purpose. For public safety of course. The same people who want Chat Control to scan our messages for sure want to scan and raise alarms for suspicious behaviors in public places too. They just can't implement it all at once or there'd be an uproar. But if it happens slowly like this, bit by bit... frogs getting boiled in the UK (and elsewhere too).
This is the kind of techno-utopian fantasy that keeps authoritarianism looking respectable. “Just encrypt it and only decrypt with a warrant” sounds lovely on paper, but in practice you’ve still built the infrastructure for a 24/7 panopticon - you’ve just wrapped it in a legal fig leaf.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.
If you trust that the law works then the data is protected by it and there is no need for encryption. But it seems that you don't trust. Aren't you planning something illegal by chance?
That probably is true by some measure. There are a lot of cameras in the UK - rather more than when I was a nipper!
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
Ah the Silver Jubilee Mugs, we had a grey one with that weird bumpy ceramic effect.
Anyway, on the cameras you're spot on. I do wonder how much UK cameras are used though - like a microcosm of our national potential, the cameras have potential but how often are they really used: half are likely faulty, most have the person monitoring them on a tea break when something happens and it seems to need an extreme act of violence before they get used in earnest.
We lived in Manc in 1977 (Dad was a soldier and did a year at UMIST to get to Lt Col, family in tow). Then we buggered off to Germany (again). For a kiddie, I had an amazing life! We were posted to Cyprus too.
Our Jub mugs were mostly transfer printed. We had coloured ones and ones with a sort of silvery monochrome effort.
I'm not too sure that the meme that the UK is the most monitored nation in the world is too true.
You probably remember 1984. I went to a jolly posh school in Devon (Wolborough Hill School, Newton Abbot) and we had to discuss 1984 in 1984.
Do you feel too monitored? I suspect that monitoring is under-reported elsewhere.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I'd bet good money "sex offenders and people wanted for the most serious crimes" end up being just a tiny fraction of the use to which the systems are put to in practice. The age verification law was supposed to be protecting children from adult content, but on the very first day they used it to lock down video of political demonstrations.
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
I seriously doubt this would stand up to a rational cost benefit analysis. If the lives of children are so very valuable I’m sure there are many more effective and cheaper things they could be doing on a per-life basis.
And Britain was Airstrip One in 1984 with most of the scenes taking place in what would have been London. Orwell definitely considered it possible that they could go that way.
>There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
> The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You have to give people a way to reduce government's power if the government does something the people don't like, but do it in a way that keeps society from flying apart.
Guns are an answer to the first problem but not the second, which is why the claim that guns protect the people from tyranny is so wrong.
The best solution i can think of is constantly seeking to reduce the government and limit it's power, size and responsibilities, always trimming the hedge. I.E. conservatism. Any government fundementally should be trusted and relied upon as little as possible, if you want to prevent abuses.
This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.
> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,
Why would we work down the prosperity chain?
There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
>There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
This is very wrong, in the sense that not everyone can do "financing/services". Lots of people, even some on this website in fact, pretend that everyone can but it just isn't true. What financializing your economy does is exacerbate existing inequalities, or build new ones where they didn't exist.
It's also, ahem, a very bad idea to intentionally deconstruct your industrial base so you can make a couple bps every quarter. The reasons for this should be quite obvious, but since for many they apparently are not ... there are very real geopolitical tensions between PRC and the US, and these tensions present a very real possibility of war. Should that happen, PRC will have the ability to squeeze US supply chains in a very devastating way. This isn't to say it would provide them an easy path to victory, but just the ability to do this increases the probability that they would initiate a conflict in the first place. This is to say that there is no such thing as a "prosperity chain" that everyone should all strive to emulate.
> There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.
There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation.
Building a Feudal Economy.
That “hierarchy” only works if the foundations stay intact. A service/finance economy without domestic manufacturing is like a skyscraper with no lower floors - great view until the support gives way. Manufacturing isn’t just a rung you discard, it’s strategic infrastructure. Lose it and you become dependent on those “lower tier” nations for essentials - and your position in the hierarchy is theirs to decide.
And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
The form of government matters a lot, when evaluating its security apparatus. I feel a lot differently about the death penalty in America than in Iran too.
No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
The fact that these people and corporations are successful as they are is a condemnation of a subset of the people in our society and the public policy that has been pushed at their behest.
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
It's a sign that Labour and Conservatives are worried they are about to lose power. They "fumbled" the economy by selling everything out to the highest bidder, created captive labour market cementing the class divide - free market only for big corporations. Now they have to protect it and themselves. They need to know what people are talking about.
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
This is untrue? Cameras in the UK are not "just used for surveillance". The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware
My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter
> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US
> or be monitored like you would be in a large city.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for
this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
It's also now the law to remove a face covering when requested by the police (it's supposed to be under certain conditions, but have fun arguing that with a jake). Actually love living in a police state. At least we repealed the law making cable ties illegal I guess.
If it's used to track folks out on bail or already convicted of violent crimes then great. However seeing what the UK police are like right now it's likely to be applied to harass genteel retirees protesting about Israeli barbarity in Palestine.
The frustration I've had in the US, and I known has been felt by friends from the UK, is that no matter who you vote for or what they promise it seems you always get more of the same.
Much of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians.
A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.
Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
But we know from comparative study of representative democracy that it does work, and it doesn't have to be "misrepresenting", and the reason certain representative democracies do a bad job of representation boils down to features o their electoral structures that produce results that are both poorly representative in the immediate term, and which also narrow the space of ideas and debate in the longer term.
> There isn't a one size fits all party.
Seems to be a non-sequitur, there isn't a one-size fits all policy, either.
I think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
Nope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.
That is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.
I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.
And you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.)
But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
This is the UK, and it's the police controlling these vans. So trans, drag and gay are not at issue here.
And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, being trans drag will, of course, attract immediate attention. But let's not pretend they leave public displays of straight sexuality (including subtle and tasteful) alone). And Morocco and Turkey are absolutely nothing like something like Afghanistan or even Iran.
But in the UK the line is drawn pretty damn far. Are you seriously complaining about that?
I'm in particular speaking about the UK, actually. consider how much anti-trans backlash there has been in the country. Consider how in Weimar Germany there was a fair bit of acceptance for the LGBT community that was quickly undone - all it takes is a charismatic leader or a king that goes along with it.
I guess at present the UK is very tolerant. But no one can predict the future. It can go downhill. Even for developed western countries. Once surveillance is setup, it is hard to restrict its usage. Especially when the society gets used to it.
Yeah, Australia's conservative side of politics (arguably both sides are conservative in this regard) have, at various times, tried to make protesting itself illegal.
I like the irony of it, and doubt that "real" protesters give much of a fuck what kinds of boundaries the protested try to put around protesting.
These kinds of things are just another data point documenting "the general decline".
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.
I feel so much better! /sarcasm
How tone deaf can they be?
Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
I was listening to an interview with Dominic Cummings while walking this evening. It was about two hours long. I don't really know what to make of Dominic Cummings, I did think it would be interesting to hear his perspective.
During the interview he explained how many people in the government essentially wanted to please their own, which includes their own class of people (city people essentially) and the media. He said that ministers were much more worried about how media was covering them, than anything else.
The same people essentially see see the normal general public and people like myself as criminal. They see us a criminal because by in large much of the general public and people like myself don't agree with them.
This sort of statement is very "on brand" if what he said is true.
Well there had been system with very high rates of false positives for certain ethnicities which if wide scale deployed would in effect be like systematic harassment of this people.
So it is a thing people which in general are okay with mass surveillance might worried about.
And convincing the people you have a chance to convince is much more useful the pointlessly trying to convince the people which anyway won't like what you do no matter what you say.
You can get UV protection hats that have a clip-able face cover for those times you just want to go outside for a minute without having to slap on sunscreen.
Have a few at home just for that, but they could definitely have a dual-use.
No, but also yes in the sense that we don't even know how many people are in the country and it's much easier to make things worse for everyone else than actually confront what has happened to the nation
Honestly I wouldn’t mind it if the police actually did anything. The UK has American style public services with European tax rates. They have Chinese style surveillance and thought control with LATAM levels of criminality.
They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
Small mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.
If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
You've demonstrated the problem with good ideas, and the vulnerabilities they have quite well. The parent poster said nothing of the sort, but you've:
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %.
It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (because too expensive) soldiers. Both the English and Roman empires did that. And then they abandon their borders to save some more money, and it all just ... fades away.
And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..
But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts, or they are concepts that provoke needless violence. They find their own nationalities an embarrassment.
Then it will be sold to the public as being successful (they are already claiming that in the article itself that it is successful). Then that will be used to justify them in other places.
What's your threshold for when it becomes a problem? Should we wait until it becomes a problem, or should we try to stop this level of facial recognition?
You should also assume this is a proof of concept. It'll get improved and scaled down to run on every police vehicle, and on every camera the police already control.
It has already been scaled down to android phones (you'll find phones are an excellent platform for this), where you can find apps that are meant to let venue-owners guard entrances against specific individuals. That's illegal, but obviously common enough to make such apps.
Why do the beat when you can sit at your desk and watch or wait for the cameras to pick something up?
They seem to have forgotten that a police presence, i.e. a patrol car cruising around or police walking or cycling the streets not only prevents some crime but makes people feel safer by their visibility.
People act like the UK is lawless and people can just steal bikes from public bike rakes, steel food from stores, or even turn up on UK shores illegally and be given 4* hotels, but presumably this isn't true given how strictly they enforce almost completely irrelevent stuff like a dude on an electrified skateboard.
It's called anarcho-tyranny. Certain crimes, and certain types of criminal, go unpunished almost as a rule. But it's very easy and not politically inconvenient to harass guys on skateboards, and people who post edgy memes on Facebook are a grave threat to our society, so there you have it.
I wonder if they left the EU so they could monitor and restrict their citizens even more effectively and quickly. Just like limiting the length of knives this will definitely not solve their crime problem.
He just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance.
Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
The last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".
This is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"
Also from the country that pissed on the request of its population to curb immigration decade after decade, for cheap labor force, political gains, and globalist ideology...
> Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
They are entitled to that argument by virtue of having guns and borders. I would rather be hypocritical than have my government expend resources on other countries altruistically
Did the people suffering the consequences of illegal immigration today performed that colonialism?
Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
No, but they benefitted from the colonialism and fight efforts to return those benefits to the colonized. We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
It’s very sad how quickly their culture is devolving. I was in the UK last year and I probably won’t be back.
The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.
Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
The point of the police state is not to prevent crime, but to silence dissent and foster cooperation with whatever government propaganda and initiatives are popular at the time.
In fact, often defeating crime is bad for this purpose. If you want to maintain a propaganda machine of an enemy within, you need crime. You might even, say, give drugs to those communities. Looking at you, CIA.
Overdosing is not a crime, it's not even the job of the Police to help, and possession of drugs is being ignored by most forces because an arrest takes two officers off frontline services for 4 hours, when it will most likely result in a caution.
>Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance, not walk by and do nothing.
This unevidenced claim is probably nonsense in any case, no police officer would simply walk by. They may very well walk by and talk into their radio to summon the right kind of help, or they may be responding to a higher priority call.
Just because your mate Bob claims they saw something, doesn't mean Bob had any real idea what was going on.
It's like the old saw about a window blind for a hospital ward costing £200, when you can buy one for £20 elsewhere. Thing is the one for £20 doesn't come with a specialised coating that eliminates bacterial or viral spread, or with a bloke that installs it according to the relevant safety regulations, or the supervisor who certifies the installation. It certainly doesn't come with a number you can call to fix the blind if there's a problem with it that includes on site service.
You and I have very different experiences with police officers. Police Officers may walk by someone overdosing is hardly a claim that needs any evidence in my experience because it's so widely understood to be true.
I saw it on video (inb4 deepfake), I did not hear it from Bob. So yeah, the cop in London did just simply walk by and did nothing. I can give you the video if you so want.
Wait, where's "here"? You just said you'd seen the police do nothing about somebody overdosing - and now you're saying that's exactly what they never do, where you are. Wherever that is.
trying to become a EU member state citizen as a UK citizen is still much easier then for many other countries
through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely
in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have.
Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut.
And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked.
And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.
If you think every politician in every country hasn't been trying to ban private communications since forever I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're certainly ahead on locking up the people who dislike Israel - you're correct on that count. Though I think the USA's still the undisputed king of that.
I’ve always wanted to visit the UK but it really sounds like a shithole now where you will be treated as guilty just for existing in public and your every move will be monitored at all times.
The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 means authorities can request encryption keys (passwords) from you and you can't say no.
Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!?
UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition in London and Wales for the last few years. Seven new regions are being added. 10 new vans coming in.
Supermarkets are using facial recognition to keep a database of people they deem criminals.
UK tried to make Apple put in a backdoor to its encrypted storage. Apple removed the ability for UK citizens to use that feature.
Online Safety Act forced online services to implement age verification for "adult" content. Many niche forums closed down because they would face large fines and jail time if they didn't comply. Larger businesses offloaded this requirement onto third party companies so now if you want to see "adult" content online you need to share your face or bank details or government ID with a random third party likely from a different country.
None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
> None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
This is because most of the public don't care about those rights either, and are entirely happy with surveillance. You've got nothing to hide right? If you don't the government to know what you're looking at its probably because you're a paedo, or maybe a terrorist. Maybe even both.
Its not the government who need to be convinced on this, it's the general public, and currently there's not really anyone out there explaining how you can't have a backdoor that only the government and good guys will be able to use.
Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
Apple made the change to advanced security in advance of the bill being finalised, now the government has gone in another direction.
All the online safety act does is implement online the law as it stands IRL. British folk have been using the same ID verification systems to validate identity for nightclub admission, passport applications, driving licence applications, benefits claims, state pension claims, disclosure and barring checks, tax filings, mortgage deeds, security clearances, job applications, and court filings since 2016.
All the reaction is just pearl clutching - 5 million checks a day are being performed, the law itself is wildly popular with 70% support amongst adults after implementation.
There are three levels of checks - IAL1 (self-asserted, low confidence), IAL2 (remote or physical proof of identity), and IAL3 (rigorous proof with biometric and physical presence requirements).
IPA 2016 affords police access to your domain history, not content history, provided police can obtain a warrant from a senior High Court Judge. The box which stores the data is at ISP level and is easily circumvented with a VPN, or simply not using your ISP's DNS servers.
IPA 2016 doesn't exempt politicians from surveillance. It includes specific provisions for heightened safeguards when intercepting their communications. The Act establishes a "triple-lock" system for warrants targeting members of a relevant legislature, requiring approval from the Secretary of State, a Judicial Commissioner, and the Prime Minister. This heightened scrutiny is in recognition of the sensitivity involved in surveilling politicians, particularly given the surveillance of Northern Irish politicians and others in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (in force 1 October 2007), and Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides powers over encryption keys/passwords etc. Section 49, RIPA can be used to force decryption, Section 51 to supply keys or passwords. These are identical to powers the police have IRL over safes, deposit boxes etcetera, and the penalty for non-compliance is identical.
You cannot use encryption or passwords to evade legal searches with a scope determined by a court on the basis of evidence of probable cause shown to the court by the entity requesting the search. A warrant from the High Court is required for each use.
Notable cases:-
- Blue chip hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally obtaining private information on behalf of blue chip companies.
- Phone hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally hacking voice mail on behalf of newspapers.
- Founder of an ISP using his position to illegally intercept communications and use them for blackmail.
> Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
No, they are not.
> Our research indicates that over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act – from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum. We know that new regulation can create uncertainty – particularly for small organisations that may be run on a part time or voluntary basis.
I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
If you happen to be running the UK panty wetters forum from your own server, then you have a problem, but grandma Jessie's knitting circle is explicitly not in scope.
YOUR link goes on to say
>the more onerous requirements will fall upon the largest services with the highest reach and/or those services that are particularly high risk.
Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
However, if you're not an adult site, you only need to comply by providing the lowest level of self certified check. Handily, most of the big forum software providers have already implemented this and offer a free service integration.
> I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
I do love it when people lie and then try to get sassy when called out.
> Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
I also like it when people who accuse others of not reading prove themselves incapable of reading - as pointed out below, what I linked is required regardless of the assumed age of your userbase.
Yes, they are in scope but a "small community forum" has nothing to do but to fill and keep a few self-assessments just in case. There is no requirement to implement age verification across the board (hence why current official guidelines target only porn sites in relation to age verification).
You are being facetious as "priority illegal contents" are the sort that are the ones that are obviously very unlikely to be encountered on a "normal" small community forum. So this is no more than a box-ticking exercise, really.
Regarding age verification, the OSA is explicit states that if you ban all such content in your T&Cs you do NOT need to have age verification.
All positives are verified by humans first before action is taken, all the system does is flag positives to an operator. Once verified, then the action movie starts.
Match quality below 0.64 is automatically discarded >0.7 is considered reliable enough for an enquiry to be made.
So far ~1,035 arrests since last year resulting in 773 charges or cautions, which is pretty good when you consider that a 'trained' police officer's odds of correctly picking a stop and search candidate are 1 in 9.
In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked, appropriate checks are made on arrest, and if you lied you get re-arrested for fraud.
The system has proved adept at monitoring sex offenders breaching their licence conditions - one man was caught with a 6-year-old when he was banned from being anywhere near children.
Before anyone waxes lyrical about the surveillance state and the number of CCTV cameras, me and the guy who stabbed me were caught on 40 cameras, and not a single one could ID either of us.
> "In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked"
Well if you are suspected of a crime they can arrest you if you refuse to identify yourself. I 'suspect' that being flagged by this system counts as such if you match someone who is wanted or similar.
You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying.
If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of. Yes, facial recognition does count, but it has to be a high confidence match >0.7, verified by a police officer personally, after the match is made, and verified again on arrest.
If you are suspected of Anti-Social Behaviour then you have to ID (Section 50 of the Police Reform Act)
If you are arrested, then you have to provide your name and address (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2000).
If you are driving, you have to ID (Section 164 of the Road Traffic Act).
Providing false information or documents is a separate criminal offence.
Essentially, police can't just rock up, demand ID, and ask questions without a compelling reason.
> You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying
> If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of
It's always been my impression that this kind of ambiguous phrasing combined with the power imbalance gives the public absolutely no protection whatsoever. Let's say you don't want to provide ID: the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID. Good luck arguing with that
>the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID.
In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.
The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.
Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.
It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.
Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.
What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?
Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?
Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
It's also worth noting that if you are arrested for a serious offence your DNA and biometrics will taken and held for ever even if you are release without charge and the real perpetrator latter convicted.
In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.
The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.
West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.
No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.
You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.
Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.
See the Scott Inquiry for details.
1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.
On arrest, you're required to provide your name and address, not proof. For the absolute majority of UK adults, it takes exactly 2 minutes to verify that data against public records - passport, driving licence, council tax, voter registration.
Lying in that situation is a separate criminal offence all of its own.
>satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat
Matches with a confidence rating of <0.64 are automatically deleted >0.7 is considered reliable enough to present to a human operator, and before any action is taken a serving police officer must verify the match, and upon arrest verify the match against the human.
>What if your child falls victim to a false identification
The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and absent any personal identification parental identification is the standard everywhere.
>15-year-old Child Q
The good old slippery slope fallacy. Both the officers who strip searched that child were fired for gross misconduct. North of 50,000 children are arrested each year and this happened once.
>Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
Thing is 12 months on, 1035 arrests, over 700 charges, and that hasn't happened because the point of testing the scheme thoroughly was to stop that from happening.
A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head).
The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.
Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.
The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.
"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"
These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the country. The first is a bit of bad luck, the second will likely become pervasive, systemic and lead to assorted other shit consequences for many people being cross-checked and categorized in all kinds of insidiuous ways
You raise a good point that if the system wrongly ID you once it means that you're probably liable to be flagged every time you walk past one of those vans...
I think it's almost inevitable. The very nature of the bureaucratic procedures that grow up around these sorts of flag lists is that effort tends to accumulate at those points, right or wrong, and your being listed on them becomes almost self-reinforcing through bureaucratic inertia and over-caution, mixed with laziness about investigating if their own systems are wrong and repairing the problem.
The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
The first time I taught, it was a rather interesting experience realizing how little capacity teachers actually have to deal with e.g. a disruptive student. Yeah you can pass them along to the disciplinarian or whatever, but in the end it's often empty threats - especially if the parents themselves don't particularly care, which in the case of highly disruptive students is nearly always the case. But if a class itself, or even a significant minority of a class, simply chose to stop cooperating - there's not much of anything anyone could do about it.
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
I was taking an intercity coach to Glasgow recently and a teenage kid was on his phone browsing social media without headphones. I made a comment that he should use headphones or turn the volume off. He got defensive and angry. I did not to escalate, and put my earplugs on.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
> The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
No, it is more like UK is now the new surveillance supermarket for EU: implementing what “works” for UK - trusted and applied technology.
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
Dire times. Double standards are in full effect.
> EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
And yet they are still pushing [0]
[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...
It's almost like huge organizations built off the backs of many different parties working in tandem, will at times have contradictory aims.
They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
Must be a truly dangerous place...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
> Must be a truly dangerous place...
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
I hope I’m not adding 2 + 2 to get 5, but it’s incredibly convenient that a lot of people are being charged for supporting a proscribed group the same month as the online safety act is rolled out…
The cynic in me almost wonders if when it comes to re-election time, these increased numbers in terrorist charges will be trotted out and the context conveniently forgotten.
It does sound terrifying that arrests for terrorism have skyrocketed lately, given that I'm pretty sure that it's neither the case that the number of terrorists has skyrocketed lately, nor the ability of the police to catch terrorists.
Its Orwellian.
You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.
Obligatory legal notice that I obviously do not support said group, but historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objectives. N one I've spoken to feels even remotely terrorised by Palestine Action, and it wouldn't even make sense to be given what they stand for.
I say this as someone who neither supports Palestine Action or shares their concerns.
Even more chilling when you find out that sentences for previous criminals are being commuted and reduced significantly for heinous crimes (theft, burglary, rape, assault, etc.), so as to clear space and make room in prisons to accommodate these "terrorists".
https://news.sky.com/story/prisoners-to-be-released-after-se...
The more dangerous people they can get on the street the more fear they can generate and the more they can whip the public to their bidding. Getting rid of the few people trying educate the public on these matters goes hand in hand.
It still arguably complies with the Paradox of Tolerance.
Terrorists (as well as their supporters) are intolerant and non-pluralist. Therefore, for a pluralist society to survive, it must be intolerant of one thing- intolerance.
The paradox of tolerance isn't wrong, but it's also invoked awfully quickly in the last years, often by people who weren't tolerant to begin with.
I'd at least like to know who defines who is a "Pluralist" and who is a "Terrorist".
Also: The paradox of tolerance can legitimately be used to call intolerant behaviors of individuals. When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
To be sure, in the original context of Popper's writing, I believe "intolerant" meant something like "committing violence against others for disagreeing with you", and "tolerate" meant "refrain from intolerance". The full quote is below:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;
Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way to force. If he was only talking about force in response to force it wouldn't be considered a paradox I don't think. This quote hasn't dispeled popular characterizations of his stance for me, it seems in line with what most people say he's saying.
As you say, it's because the speech may later give way to force. It does go farther than American free speech law permits: the latter draws the line at something like "threats of immediate criminal action", whereas this would attack "propagating ideologies that one thinks will eventually lead the followers to criminal action". There are certainly deep problems with potential implementation here: e.g. the main American political parties would probably both accuse each other's ideology of eventually leading the followers to criminal action. One would want high standards for that (of, say, what percentage engage in what magnitude of criminal action; as well as evidentiary standards), and want it to be established in a mega-trial, or by a supermajority of Congress declaring war on an ideology; and even that might not be enough. I'm not necessarily in favor of Popper's approach, except in emergencies.
However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
It’s basic game theory. If someone is not nice to you, you have to be not nice for them.
I can't tell if this is serious or not, but I strongly disagree with this advice if it is.
>* The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.*
Per-capita it’s less than the US.
But with the smaller space for the population, it's nearly total coverage from multiple angles vs the wide distances separating the equivalent number of cameras in the US.
And generally people speak about London specifically and not about rural UK areas.
Judge Dredd was an 80s reaction to this ethos. It’s old.
The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage already.
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
I don't think this is true. Apparently the operation of a large majority of those private cameras is in fact outsourced to a handful of big security companies, and many of them are remotely operated. This makes getting access to private cameras a lot easier for police than you think.
There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
> It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys
there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)
like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it
and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).
And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.
and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?
anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.
> like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
Well. Maybe[0].
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
Wow, never heard this version. Fascinating.
I'm thinking it through, and I've arrived at the puzzling conclusion we shouldn't make it too hard for people to break the law.
Isn't that precisely the point. If there are so many laws that are so easily broken, you have a reason to pickup anyone of interest at any time.
Eh, I see what I wrote was ambiguous. I meant "not hard to defy the law", you're on "not hard to be tripped up by the law".
Not so puzzling; see also this classic post from Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal: https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
The optimal amount of fraud or lawlessness isn't zero.
>if you have nothing to hide
But it's not you that decides that what you are doing is harmless. It's what the authorities decide; and that can be quite different from what you or other people deem "nothing to hide".
You're mixing your definitions of authoritarian, there's authoritarian in the 'Nolan chart' sense of the word, which just means 'not a Libertarian', which is like 98% of people, which is different to the Hitler meaning of authoritarian, which means 'rejecting democracy'. If the people agree to ban things they don't like, that's democracy, so it's the Nolan kind of authoritarian but not the Hitler kind of authoritarian. Deciding the people shouldn't be allowed to agree collectively to ban certain things is rejecting democracy, so it's Hitler authoritarian but not Nolan authoritarian.
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other.
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
> We could trust the government to be good
no. you cannot. ever.
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
The 2 best surveillance methods for crime investigation are LPR Cameras and cashless public transport.
Both of them then rely on the next step after providing information, following the people who triggered the first layer with CCTV.
If I went into my local CBD right now, and comitted some badass crime. explode a cop car or something we all yearn to do. All the exits are covered. I wont get anywhere walking and covering my face. I can get on a train but the rozzers will know where I get off. Likewise, if I jump in a car, they can track it almost anywhere for the next 100 kilometers.
I dont think the goal is prevention, its the guaranteed catch. Its the body of evidence that starts piling up when you burn cop car 1.
When brisbane introduced the go card system, we had our first arrest based on go card travel data within a month.
Sad really.
>bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
I helped an employer comply like this once. Someone had been brutally killed by a driver. The victim only existed for like 3 frames on the recording. But the cop wasnt interested in that anyway. They had managed to sneak drugs out of their car, into their pocket and then hide them in our garden, mid arrest. Embarrasing for the cop you see. The cop already had the driver on vehicular manslaughter, but thanks to the power of CCTV, they could also add a charge for drug crimes.
Even if you have a "good" government that goodness will make it a target for those who seek to co-opt it as a means to their desired end, and their desired ends are never good because if they were they would pursue cheaper less circuitous paths to them.
I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.
All the recent policy, technical leaps, and innovation around policing seem to be focused on cracking down on protesting and speech, and not really on what people would consider "fighting crime". You could get mugged on the street corner in broad daylight (or worse) and the police won't even answer your phone call, but the minute you show up on that street corner with 10 friends carrying signs and shouting, 20 officers will show up in riot gear, and every one of you will be identified using technology.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Always been that way, always will be. It's just a little harder to bury your head in the sand than it used to be.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Nope. That's an ideology, not a statement of fact. It completely negates the possibility that systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose.
the purpose of circular logic is circular logic
The surveillance is there not to catch small thieves, but those who are against the government, against wars etc. A small thief doesn't threaten the regime in any way so he can be dealt with after more dangerous people are dealt with.
In fact, the petty criminal may benefit the regime, if his crimes damage those the regime sees as a greater threat to itself and its goals.
The petty thief causes the useful idiots to clamor for more dragnet.
This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
And so it's just a bill away from the data is suddenly being available for any purpose. For public safety of course. The same people who want Chat Control to scan our messages for sure want to scan and raise alarms for suspicious behaviors in public places too. They just can't implement it all at once or there'd be an uproar. But if it happens slowly like this, bit by bit... frogs getting boiled in the UK (and elsewhere too).
This is the kind of techno-utopian fantasy that keeps authoritarianism looking respectable. “Just encrypt it and only decrypt with a warrant” sounds lovely on paper, but in practice you’ve still built the infrastructure for a 24/7 panopticon - you’ve just wrapped it in a legal fig leaf.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.
Because if you build it, they will come and use it for any purpose they can think of in the end!
If you trust that the law works then the data is protected by it and there is no need for encryption. But it seems that you don't trust. Aren't you planning something illegal by chance?
People beat up the UK for their stance on this stuff all the time.
>it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
No
This public information poster is from 2002.
https://live.staticflickr.com/2314/2171185463_92a40441ab_b.j...
The Brits have been going full steam ahead for many decades.
Quickly? London is one of the most CCTV covered cities in the world, and has been since the 70s
As shocking as this is, it's not _surprising_
That probably is true by some measure. There are a lot of cameras in the UK - rather more than when I was a nipper!
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
Are you a local?
Ah the Silver Jubilee Mugs, we had a grey one with that weird bumpy ceramic effect.
Anyway, on the cameras you're spot on. I do wonder how much UK cameras are used though - like a microcosm of our national potential, the cameras have potential but how often are they really used: half are likely faulty, most have the person monitoring them on a tea break when something happens and it seems to need an extreme act of violence before they get used in earnest.
We lived in Manc in 1977 (Dad was a soldier and did a year at UMIST to get to Lt Col, family in tow). Then we buggered off to Germany (again). For a kiddie, I had an amazing life! We were posted to Cyprus too.
Our Jub mugs were mostly transfer printed. We had coloured ones and ones with a sort of silvery monochrome effort.
I'm not too sure that the meme that the UK is the most monitored nation in the world is too true.
You probably remember 1984. I went to a jolly posh school in Devon (Wolborough Hill School, Newton Abbot) and we had to discuss 1984 in 1984.
Do you feel too monitored? I suspect that monitoring is under-reported elsewhere.
Every accusation from the West towards China is an admission of guilt. It is called projection: accusing others of what you actually are doing.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I'd bet good money "sex offenders and people wanted for the most serious crimes" end up being just a tiny fraction of the use to which the systems are put to in practice. The age verification law was supposed to be protecting children from adult content, but on the very first day they used it to lock down video of political demonstrations.
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
I’ll let you figure out who’s quote that is
I seriously doubt this would stand up to a rational cost benefit analysis. If the lives of children are so very valuable I’m sure there are many more effective and cheaper things they could be doing on a per-life basis.
Now I understand why Black Mirror is a British show.
And Britain was Airstrip One in 1984 with most of the scenes taking place in what would have been London. Orwell definitely considered it possible that they could go that way.
Well, China got away with it.
More than got away with it, actually... they prospered.
There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
>There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
> The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You have to give people a way to reduce government's power if the government does something the people don't like, but do it in a way that keeps society from flying apart.
Guns are an answer to the first problem but not the second, which is why the claim that guns protect the people from tyranny is so wrong.
The best solution i can think of is constantly seeking to reduce the government and limit it's power, size and responsibilities, always trimming the hedge. I.E. conservatism. Any government fundementally should be trusted and relied upon as little as possible, if you want to prevent abuses.
You're not describing conservatism, you're describing anarchism.
This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.
> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,
Why would we work down the prosperity chain?
There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
>There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
This is very wrong, in the sense that not everyone can do "financing/services". Lots of people, even some on this website in fact, pretend that everyone can but it just isn't true. What financializing your economy does is exacerbate existing inequalities, or build new ones where they didn't exist.
It's also, ahem, a very bad idea to intentionally deconstruct your industrial base so you can make a couple bps every quarter. The reasons for this should be quite obvious, but since for many they apparently are not ... there are very real geopolitical tensions between PRC and the US, and these tensions present a very real possibility of war. Should that happen, PRC will have the ability to squeeze US supply chains in a very devastating way. This isn't to say it would provide them an easy path to victory, but just the ability to do this increases the probability that they would initiate a conflict in the first place. This is to say that there is no such thing as a "prosperity chain" that everyone should all strive to emulate.
> There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.
There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
>financing/services dominant economies
But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation. Building a Feudal Economy.
That “hierarchy” only works if the foundations stay intact. A service/finance economy without domestic manufacturing is like a skyscraper with no lower floors - great view until the support gives way. Manufacturing isn’t just a rung you discard, it’s strategic infrastructure. Lose it and you become dependent on those “lower tier” nations for essentials - and your position in the hierarchy is theirs to decide.
And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
The USA is doing the same, it’s just quieter.
The form of government matters a lot, when evaluating its security apparatus. I feel a lot differently about the death penalty in America than in Iran too.
Are you American, Iranian, or some other?
that is very funny thank you
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
There is always a danger that the ruling class may not stay in power forever, unless the others are nailed to the ground.
No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
The fact that these people and corporations are successful as they are is a condemnation of a subset of the people in our society and the public policy that has been pushed at their behest.
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
Whatever they accuse China of is always a projection.
At least China has manufacturing, jobs and thriving middle class.
Cynically, it's just another form of infrastructure we are behind the curve on.
It's a sign that Labour and Conservatives are worried they are about to lose power. They "fumbled" the economy by selling everything out to the highest bidder, created captive labour market cementing the class divide - free market only for big corporations. Now they have to protect it and themselves. They need to know what people are talking about.
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
This is untrue? Cameras in the UK are not "just used for surveillance". The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-t...
That's statistics for London, not the rest of the UK.
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware
My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter
> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US
> or be monitored like you would be in a large city.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
If the US government requests such access, do you see a world in which Waymo says no, given the current landscape?
Furthermore, if a National Security Letter came along with that request, Waymo wouldn't be able to let anyone know about it.
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
Musk didnt try the hyperloop to be altruistic
He did it to kill any chance of the state improving the train/tram network so that Tesla cars would have less competition for public transport
Source: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/photo/2
Archived here: https://archive.is/iBAJr
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
What did you witness or experience flying via Heathrow that made it apparent to you?
We're too scared to talk about it lest our faces get added to a list.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
Singapore should have that beat. I’m not saying the UK isn’t nuts for CCTV, it’s just that Sg feels like it is on another level.
This would lead to a rise in doctors and accountants wearing the combo of Canada goose jacket, balaclava and man-sling-bag in summer.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
Currently, the police are catching up with shopping centres and entertainment chains who've been using this tech for years.
The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR.
Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator.
The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.
This is the same country that couldn’t introduce driver’s licences with pictures for privacy and surveillance for years. What happened?
Increased paranoia among the rulers because of their guilty conscience.
It's also now the law to remove a face covering when requested by the police (it's supposed to be under certain conditions, but have fun arguing that with a jake). Actually love living in a police state. At least we repealed the law making cable ties illegal I guess.
God help you if you walk out of a store with a butter knife and forget your receipt.
Sort of silly to talk about this when everyone is holding a facing-them network camera in front of themselves much of every day.
Straw man.
Sippy cup, man.
Paper straw man*
Related: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_fac...
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887373, but we merged that thread hither)
Either the England is a shithole overrun with crime, or English elites are paranoid. Locals can tell me which one it is.
If it's used to track folks out on bail or already convicted of violent crimes then great. However seeing what the UK police are like right now it's likely to be applied to harass genteel retirees protesting about Israeli barbarity in Palestine.
Isn't UK a democracy? Why then have the people not rejected the initiative? Ah, right - they haven't even been asked.
The frustration I've had in the US, and I known has been felt by friends from the UK, is that no matter who you vote for or what they promise it seems you always get more of the same.
Much of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians.
A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.
Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
It's representative democracy so we can choose which party who will misrepresent us. Then choose another one which will misrepresent us.
It's about time that idea was crushed and we moved to voting on policies rather than parties and personalities. There isn't a one size fits all party.
But we know from comparative study of representative democracy that it does work, and it doesn't have to be "misrepresenting", and the reason certain representative democracies do a bad job of representation boils down to features o their electoral structures that produce results that are both poorly representative in the immediate term, and which also narrow the space of ideas and debate in the longer term.
> There isn't a one size fits all party.
Seems to be a non-sequitur, there isn't a one-size fits all policy, either.
I think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
"What do I care, I've got nothing to hide."
Because the curtain-twitching UK public loves this sort of stuff?
Who is pushing this within the UK- government aside? I want some avenues of search that help me make sense of where the world is heading. Thanks.
Can email my proton proxy in my profile if you want to be discreet. I have a whole life ahead of me and need to know how to prepare.
Even within the government I can’t understand how a democratically elected politician could support something like this.
Doesn't the UK have cameras everywhere doing this anyways?
Nope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.
That is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.
Or that when they fail, they get left up anyway
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
We are going to be hearing that argument a lot as the AI police state evolves
I have so much to hide.
I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.
And you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.)
But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
This is the UK, and it's the police controlling these vans. So trans, drag and gay are not at issue here.
And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, being trans drag will, of course, attract immediate attention. But let's not pretend they leave public displays of straight sexuality (including subtle and tasteful) alone). And Morocco and Turkey are absolutely nothing like something like Afghanistan or even Iran.
But in the UK the line is drawn pretty damn far. Are you seriously complaining about that?
I'm in particular speaking about the UK, actually. consider how much anti-trans backlash there has been in the country. Consider how in Weimar Germany there was a fair bit of acceptance for the LGBT community that was quickly undone - all it takes is a charismatic leader or a king that goes along with it.
I guess at present the UK is very tolerant. But no one can predict the future. It can go downhill. Even for developed western countries. Once surveillance is setup, it is hard to restrict its usage. Especially when the society gets used to it.
Brass eye came true! What is this for? Laser audio mics into the bedrooms of suspected anime forum members?
Suitably organised protest folks need to roll out anti facial recognition tools. Maybe even turn facial coverings into a source of revenue.
One tool would be methods to blind said facial recognition vans. Cameras are relatively easily "blinded".
Assuming those don’t become illegal - Australian authorities are looking to ban face masks at protests- https://www.hrlc.org.au/explainers/human-rights-briefing-vic...
Yeah, Australia's conservative side of politics (arguably both sides are conservative in this regard) have, at various times, tried to make protesting itself illegal.
I like the irony of it, and doubt that "real" protesters give much of a fuck what kinds of boundaries the protested try to put around protesting.
These kinds of things are just another data point documenting "the general decline".
Never been a better time than now to engage yourself politically.
None. We have more to lose and are losing more than ever before.
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.
I feel so much better! /sarcasm
How tone deaf can they be?
Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
The vast majority of newspaper articles/videos about this tech relate to innocent black people being flagged.
Racism is certainly the biggest concern of the media, which may or may not reflect the publics general concern.
I was listening to an interview with Dominic Cummings while walking this evening. It was about two hours long. I don't really know what to make of Dominic Cummings, I did think it would be interesting to hear his perspective.
During the interview he explained how many people in the government essentially wanted to please their own, which includes their own class of people (city people essentially) and the media. He said that ministers were much more worried about how media was covering them, than anything else.
The same people essentially see see the normal general public and people like myself as criminal. They see us a criminal because by in large much of the general public and people like myself don't agree with them.
This sort of statement is very "on brand" if what he said is true.
Well there had been system with very high rates of false positives for certain ethnicities which if wide scale deployed would in effect be like systematic harassment of this people.
So it is a thing people which in general are okay with mass surveillance might worried about.
And convincing the people you have a chance to convince is much more useful the pointlessly trying to convince the people which anyway won't like what you do no matter what you say.
It reads more like something to appease some media outlets and activist groups than the general public.
We shall have to adopt a new fashion for Australian style cork hats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_hat
You can get UV protection hats that have a clip-able face cover for those times you just want to go outside for a minute without having to slap on sunscreen.
Have a few at home just for that, but they could definitely have a dual-use.
Damn could you link me? That’s exactly what I’m after. Or give me the search terms? Thanks.
Why do people need to be surveilled in the first place? Is Britain so full of offenders?
Colonial/empire mentality. It always comes home to roost, and the people are always surprised when it does.
No, but also yes in the sense that we don't even know how many people are in the country and it's much easier to make things worse for everyone else than actually confront what has happened to the nation
The UK is almost lost.
It's done been lost.
They are a failed people.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind it if the police actually did anything. The UK has American style public services with European tax rates. They have Chinese style surveillance and thought control with LATAM levels of criminality.
They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
The British state is actually very effective at doing what it wants to do - it just doesn't want to do the things we consider to be 'right'.
The government prioritises order over law, liquidity over solvency and the status of our politicians at international dinner parties.
I'm so embarrassed to be British these days. We're a small island of small minded people.
Small mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.
We're already well into the process of being overrun so that strategy obviously didn't work.
Are your ideas not good enough to persuade?
If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
You've demonstrated the problem with good ideas, and the vulnerabilities they have quite well. The parent poster said nothing of the sort, but you've:
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
Good ideas don't have to be persuassive to be good
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %.
It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (because too expensive) soldiers. Both the English and Roman empires did that. And then they abandon their borders to save some more money, and it all just ... fades away.
And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..
But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
>But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
Rome figured this out I think. It didn’t fall. It silently converted into a church. More reach, less defending walls.
Being embarrassed by your nationality or citizenship is certainly a feat of small mindedness.
Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts, or they are concepts that provoke needless violence. They find their own nationalities an embarrassment.
We're so small-minded we let in more than basically anyone else as a percentage of our population and land area.
I mean, if by small minded you mean "stupid" you're probably right, but I don't think you can mean much else. Unless you've never been anywhere else.
Stupid has boundaries on the evil it can do. Smart people of good intent are far more dangerous than stupid people.
10 vans works out at one for every 10,000 square miles. Hardly a "roll out across the UK".
It is the "Thin end of the wedge".
Then it will be sold to the public as being successful (they are already claiming that in the article itself that it is successful). Then that will be used to justify them in other places.
> Hardly a "roll out across the UK".
What's your threshold for when it becomes a problem? Should we wait until it becomes a problem, or should we try to stop this level of facial recognition?
You should also assume this is a proof of concept. It'll get improved and scaled down to run on every police vehicle, and on every camera the police already control.
It has already been scaled down to android phones (you'll find phones are an excellent platform for this), where you can find apps that are meant to let venue-owners guard entrances against specific individuals. That's illegal, but obviously common enough to make such apps.
They seem to be doing everything except actual policing.
Correct.
Why do the beat when you can sit at your desk and watch or wait for the cameras to pick something up?
They seem to have forgotten that a police presence, i.e. a patrol car cruising around or police walking or cycling the streets not only prevents some crime but makes people feel safer by their visibility.
To be fair they did stop a guy on a skateboard the other day, fined him £300, and gave him 6 points on his non-existent license, https://x.com/JamesHarvey2503/status/1955215331959394764
People act like the UK is lawless and people can just steal bikes from public bike rakes, steel food from stores, or even turn up on UK shores illegally and be given 4* hotels, but presumably this isn't true given how strictly they enforce almost completely irrelevent stuff like a dude on an electrified skateboard.
It's called anarcho-tyranny. Certain crimes, and certain types of criminal, go unpunished almost as a rule. But it's very easy and not politically inconvenient to harass guys on skateboards, and people who post edgy memes on Facebook are a grave threat to our society, so there you have it.
I wonder if they left the EU so they could monitor and restrict their citizens even more effectively and quickly. Just like limiting the length of knives this will definitely not solve their crime problem.
Orwell was way too kind.
Orwell turned in his friends and acquaintances. He was against totalitarianism and that is all.
He just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance.
Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
The last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".
Huxley and Bradbury did.
This is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"
The UK is broke but has infinite money for a surveillance state.
One justification for increased surveillance is that it is cheaper than hiring police officers.
Is it if equipment maintenance and building/installing costs keep going up?
Replacing police officers is about removing a human decision element from lower class suppression.
ask yourself why.
Well, that's some distopean shit right there ain't it
From the country that brought you vans telling immigrants to "GO HOME OR FACE ARREST" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Go_Home%22_vans
Also from the country with television detection vans so you can pay your TV tax, what CAN'T vans do?
Which country do you mean? :)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funkmesswagen_(Fernmeldewesen)...
Also from the country that pissed on the request of its population to curb immigration decade after decade, for cheap labor force, political gains, and globalist ideology...
Not immigrants. Illegal immigrants.
Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
> Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
They are entitled to that argument by virtue of having guns and borders. I would rather be hypocritical than have my government expend resources on other countries altruistically
Did the people suffering the consequences of illegal immigration today performed that colonialism?
Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
No, but they benefitted from the colonialism and fight efforts to return those benefits to the colonized. We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
Did they ask to benefit from it? Being nice to everyone and accepting mass immigration aren't the same thing.
Whenever a brutal regime rise again, it will thrive due to the amount of work being done on surveillance tech.
Can you imagine Adolf (DE), Benito (IT), and Joseph (RU) with access to the same surveillance tech?
It’s very sad how quickly their culture is devolving. I was in the UK last year and I probably won’t be back.
The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
They should have stayed in the EU.
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.
Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
The point of the police state is not to prevent crime, but to silence dissent and foster cooperation with whatever government propaganda and initiatives are popular at the time.
In fact, often defeating crime is bad for this purpose. If you want to maintain a propaganda machine of an enemy within, you need crime. You might even, say, give drugs to those communities. Looking at you, CIA.
Overdosing is not a crime, it's not even the job of the Police to help, and possession of drugs is being ignored by most forces because an arrest takes two officers off frontline services for 4 hours, when it will most likely result in a caution.
Why are you making excuses like this? Demand better from the people that would hold authority over you.
They don't have "authority over you" unless you've committed a crime.
Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance, not walk by and do nothing.
Also if someone is overdosing, they are probably possessing.
People should do it at home or somewhere else, not on the streets. I don't care if someone is consuming inside their home.
>Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance, not walk by and do nothing.
This unevidenced claim is probably nonsense in any case, no police officer would simply walk by. They may very well walk by and talk into their radio to summon the right kind of help, or they may be responding to a higher priority call.
Just because your mate Bob claims they saw something, doesn't mean Bob had any real idea what was going on.
It's like the old saw about a window blind for a hospital ward costing £200, when you can buy one for £20 elsewhere. Thing is the one for £20 doesn't come with a specialised coating that eliminates bacterial or viral spread, or with a bloke that installs it according to the relevant safety regulations, or the supervisor who certifies the installation. It certainly doesn't come with a number you can call to fix the blind if there's a problem with it that includes on site service.
> no police officer would simply walk by
You and I have very different experiences with police officers. Police Officers may walk by someone overdosing is hardly a claim that needs any evidence in my experience because it's so widely understood to be true.
I saw it on video (inb4 deepfake), I did not hear it from Bob. So yeah, the cop in London did just simply walk by and did nothing. I can give you the video if you so want.
Go ahead and post.
You're right! Your anecdote is much better than theirs. You won me over at least.
Lmao. Hey, I have it on video. I will post it if he really wants it.
Wait, where's "here"? You just said you'd seen the police do nothing about somebody overdosing - and now you're saying that's exactly what they never do, where you are. Wherever that is.
One doesn't do drugs. One consumes or sells them.
Next time do HN better :)
> Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
To haras and punish people disagreeing with the ruling class?
Out of curiosity exactly who is this ruling class?
Let's say those people for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
You mean idiots who went to private schools then?
The Conservatives are out of power. They were defeated in the last election.
You can just say it.
Its all very dystopian.
People say we need to fight back against this but realistically how?
I would honestly start looking to flee the UK.
And go where? Also how to do that legally? You just can't show up to say Moldova and start living there.
Ireland, Isle of Man, or Gibraltar.
Most of European Union?
5 years too late for that!
trying to become a EU member state citizen as a UK citizen is still much easier then for many other countries
through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely
in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have.
Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut.
And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked.
And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.
They are just a couple of years behind. Currently trying to ban private communications. Ahead on locking up political rivals.
If you think every politician in every country hasn't been trying to ban private communications since forever I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're certainly ahead on locking up the people who dislike Israel - you're correct on that count. Though I think the USA's still the undisputed king of that.
There seems to only be a single free country left sadly.
Namely, the Netherlands.
Why not do it? You could start right now. There's no rule against it.
I’ve always wanted to visit the UK but it really sounds like a shithole now where you will be treated as guilty just for existing in public and your every move will be monitored at all times.
See also
https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
^camouflage face paint against facial recognition
Some context with a link, beyond "just click this", would be nice
HN title is wrong - the article title says "...across police forces in England".
Thanks! We've changed the title now.
It's not wrong as England is within the UK: it's just not as precise as it could have been.
HN Guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"
The changed title is actually misleading since it includes three other countries that didn’t appear in the original.
That's on me, i made a mistake when writing the title
In itself this is a storm in a teacup.
The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 means authorities can request encryption keys (passwords) from you and you can't say no.
Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!?
UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition in London and Wales for the last few years. Seven new regions are being added. 10 new vans coming in.
Supermarkets are using facial recognition to keep a database of people they deem criminals.
UK tried to make Apple put in a backdoor to its encrypted storage. Apple removed the ability for UK citizens to use that feature.
Online Safety Act forced online services to implement age verification for "adult" content. Many niche forums closed down because they would face large fines and jail time if they didn't comply. Larger businesses offloaded this requirement onto third party companies so now if you want to see "adult" content online you need to share your face or bank details or government ID with a random third party likely from a different country.
None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
> None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
This is because most of the public don't care about those rights either, and are entirely happy with surveillance. You've got nothing to hide right? If you don't the government to know what you're looking at its probably because you're a paedo, or maybe a terrorist. Maybe even both.
Its not the government who need to be convinced on this, it's the general public, and currently there's not really anyone out there explaining how you can't have a backdoor that only the government and good guys will be able to use.
Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
Apple made the change to advanced security in advance of the bill being finalised, now the government has gone in another direction.
All the online safety act does is implement online the law as it stands IRL. British folk have been using the same ID verification systems to validate identity for nightclub admission, passport applications, driving licence applications, benefits claims, state pension claims, disclosure and barring checks, tax filings, mortgage deeds, security clearances, job applications, and court filings since 2016.
All the reaction is just pearl clutching - 5 million checks a day are being performed, the law itself is wildly popular with 70% support amongst adults after implementation.
There are three levels of checks - IAL1 (self-asserted, low confidence), IAL2 (remote or physical proof of identity), and IAL3 (rigorous proof with biometric and physical presence requirements).
IPA 2016 affords police access to your domain history, not content history, provided police can obtain a warrant from a senior High Court Judge. The box which stores the data is at ISP level and is easily circumvented with a VPN, or simply not using your ISP's DNS servers.
IPA 2016 doesn't exempt politicians from surveillance. It includes specific provisions for heightened safeguards when intercepting their communications. The Act establishes a "triple-lock" system for warrants targeting members of a relevant legislature, requiring approval from the Secretary of State, a Judicial Commissioner, and the Prime Minister. This heightened scrutiny is in recognition of the sensitivity involved in surveilling politicians, particularly given the surveillance of Northern Irish politicians and others in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (in force 1 October 2007), and Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides powers over encryption keys/passwords etc. Section 49, RIPA can be used to force decryption, Section 51 to supply keys or passwords. These are identical to powers the police have IRL over safes, deposit boxes etcetera, and the penalty for non-compliance is identical.
You cannot use encryption or passwords to evade legal searches with a scope determined by a court on the basis of evidence of probable cause shown to the court by the entity requesting the search. A warrant from the High Court is required for each use.
Notable cases:-
- Blue chip hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally obtaining private information on behalf of blue chip companies.
- Phone hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally hacking voice mail on behalf of newspapers.
- Founder of an ISP using his position to illegally intercept communications and use them for blackmail.
> Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
No, they are not.
> Our research indicates that over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act – from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum. We know that new regulation can create uncertainty – particularly for small organisations that may be run on a part time or voluntary basis.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
If you happen to be running the UK panty wetters forum from your own server, then you have a problem, but grandma Jessie's knitting circle is explicitly not in scope.
YOUR link goes on to say
>the more onerous requirements will fall upon the largest services with the highest reach and/or those services that are particularly high risk.
Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
However, if you're not an adult site, you only need to comply by providing the lowest level of self certified check. Handily, most of the big forum software providers have already implemented this and offer a free service integration.
Storm meet teacup.
> I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
I do love it when people lie and then try to get sassy when called out.
> Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
I also like it when people who accuse others of not reading prove themselves incapable of reading - as pointed out below, what I linked is required regardless of the assumed age of your userbase.
Yes, they are in scope but a "small community forum" has nothing to do but to fill and keep a few self-assessments just in case. There is no requirement to implement age verification across the board (hence why current official guidelines target only porn sites in relation to age verification).
> a few self-assessments just in case
Ah right, just a couple of forms how bad can it possi...
> Step 1: identify the 17 kinds of priority illegal content that need to be separately assessed
lol.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
>identify the 17 kinds of priority illegal content that need to be separately assessed
If you're a site with lots of child users, or if your site holds pornography.
No. What you have in mind is probably a Children’s Access Assessment[1], which is not what I linked.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
You are being facetious as "priority illegal contents" are the sort that are the ones that are obviously very unlikely to be encountered on a "normal" small community forum. So this is no more than a box-ticking exercise, really.
Regarding age verification, the OSA is explicit states that if you ban all such content in your T&Cs you do NOT need to have age verification.
> this is no more than a box-ticking exercise, really
You won't mind getting rid of it, then.
All positives are verified by humans first before action is taken, all the system does is flag positives to an operator. Once verified, then the action movie starts.
Match quality below 0.64 is automatically discarded >0.7 is considered reliable enough for an enquiry to be made.
So far ~1,035 arrests since last year resulting in 773 charges or cautions, which is pretty good when you consider that a 'trained' police officer's odds of correctly picking a stop and search candidate are 1 in 9.
In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked, appropriate checks are made on arrest, and if you lied you get re-arrested for fraud.
The system has proved adept at monitoring sex offenders breaching their licence conditions - one man was caught with a 6-year-old when he was banned from being anywhere near children.
Before anyone waxes lyrical about the surveillance state and the number of CCTV cameras, me and the guy who stabbed me were caught on 40 cameras, and not a single one could ID either of us.
Thanks, very informative.
> "In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked"
Well if you are suspected of a crime they can arrest you if you refuse to identify yourself. I 'suspect' that being flagged by this system counts as such if you match someone who is wanted or similar.
You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying.
If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of. Yes, facial recognition does count, but it has to be a high confidence match >0.7, verified by a police officer personally, after the match is made, and verified again on arrest.
If you are suspected of Anti-Social Behaviour then you have to ID (Section 50 of the Police Reform Act)
If you are arrested, then you have to provide your name and address (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2000).
If you are driving, you have to ID (Section 164 of the Road Traffic Act).
Providing false information or documents is a separate criminal offence.
Essentially, police can't just rock up, demand ID, and ask questions without a compelling reason.
> You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying
> If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of
It's always been my impression that this kind of ambiguous phrasing combined with the power imbalance gives the public absolutely no protection whatsoever. Let's say you don't want to provide ID: the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID. Good luck arguing with that
>the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID.
In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.
The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.
Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.
It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.
The police will protect their own first. The blue code of silence is a thing that happens in the UK.
Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.
What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?
Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?
Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
It's also worth noting that if you are arrested for a serious offence your DNA and biometrics will taken and held for ever even if you are release without charge and the real perpetrator latter convicted.
In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.
The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.
West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.
No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.
You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.
Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.
See the Scott Inquiry for details.
1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.
>Then what happens if you don't have ID
On arrest, you're required to provide your name and address, not proof. For the absolute majority of UK adults, it takes exactly 2 minutes to verify that data against public records - passport, driving licence, council tax, voter registration.
Lying in that situation is a separate criminal offence all of its own.
>satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat
Matches with a confidence rating of <0.64 are automatically deleted >0.7 is considered reliable enough to present to a human operator, and before any action is taken a serving police officer must verify the match, and upon arrest verify the match against the human.
>What if your child falls victim to a false identification
The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and absent any personal identification parental identification is the standard everywhere.
>15-year-old Child Q
The good old slippery slope fallacy. Both the officers who strip searched that child were fired for gross misconduct. North of 50,000 children are arrested each year and this happened once.
>Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
Thing is 12 months on, 1035 arrests, over 700 charges, and that hasn't happened because the point of testing the scheme thoroughly was to stop that from happening.
What proof do you have that it doesn't work.
What happens when a police constable thinks they recognise you from evidence they have in an investigation or a wanted person notice?
This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.
A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head).
The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.
Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.
The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.
[0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
> [0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
The article does not claim this:
"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"
These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the country. The first is a bit of bad luck, the second will likely become pervasive, systemic and lead to assorted other shit consequences for many people being cross-checked and categorized in all kinds of insidiuous ways
You raise a good point that if the system wrongly ID you once it means that you're probably liable to be flagged every time you walk past one of those vans...
I think it's almost inevitable. The very nature of the bureaucratic procedures that grow up around these sorts of flag lists is that effort tends to accumulate at those points, right or wrong, and your being listed on them becomes almost self-reinforcing through bureaucratic inertia and over-caution, mixed with laziness about investigating if their own systems are wrong and repairing the problem.
The UK ran out of colonies to oppress so they turned on their own people.