I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.
What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
dgellow 5 minutes ago [-]
I’m sure we can find a better anecdote than a bike being stolen…
unethical_ban 3 minutes ago [-]
Omniscient government surveillance in practice will be of far more use for harassment and suppressing political dissent than it ever will be used for the public good.
krona 12 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps it will be the first protest where FR is used, but the first pilot (which ended in March) just put 2 FR cameras on a street in Croydon and they arrested "170 wanted criminals" in 6 months.
A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
so she was 16 when she "disappeared" (how, where, sleeping in the streets?) and the camera can link a 16 y.o. face to a 36 y.o. one after probably rough years?
12 minutes ago [-]
phyzix5761 25 minutes ago [-]
The UK is one of the most effective and longest running surveillance states so this should not be a surprise to anyone.
Joker_vD 39 seconds ago [-]
Well, Orwell wrote about what he knew.
stavros 49 minutes ago [-]
Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well.
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
NooneAtAll3 8 minutes ago [-]
if protest expects confrontation (for either side reasons), it's possible for roads to be preemptively de-surfaced to get stones to throw at police
1shooner 31 minutes ago [-]
I don't personally support this surveillance, but that isn't what the articles says. It says they will be "scanning for suspects from above." And later quotes the Met making reference to 'intelligence'. So conceivably they could have information about the plans of specific individuals at this event.
suburban_strike 15 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't matter what the article says. There is no penalty for lying and no incentive to be honest. The media exists to broadcast their lies at scale.
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
stavros 30 minutes ago [-]
Right, but suspects of what? Just in general, all the crimes they know about?
futter9 25 minutes ago [-]
Maybe one of them has quoted crime or immigration statistics on social media and must therefore be imprisoned.
hactually 47 minutes ago [-]
Must be some heinous crimes to enable dragnet surveillance. That or the rotten state of Britain really is trying anything from splitting at the seams.
Must be the heinous crime thing tho.
philipallstar 26 minutes ago [-]
Its definitely not heinous crimes. It's just recording people at events to know who's of what political persuasion.
conradludgate 20 minutes ago [-]
It's worth stating that historically these right-wing culture protests have been a bit more violent in nature than most protests are. I'm not suggesting that everyone in the protest is violent, but there's enough mob mentality that makes me (someone who lives in London) uncomfortable.
stavros 11 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but there's a difference between surveillance after a crime vs before.
rolph 35 minutes ago [-]
facial recognition is old news, the development of intent prediction is the edge.
baal80spam 41 minutes ago [-]
Thought crime, obviously!
onetokeoverthe 30 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 21:42:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
Must be the heinous crime thing tho.