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To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first

the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then

in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete

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

Just want to add, the overhead cameras at checkout are pointed straight down and can read your phone password as you put it in to pull up Apple Pay.

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

Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways.

When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.

Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)

---

R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?

D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.

If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.

R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...

D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.

R.E: Could I get some food?

D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,

"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...

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

Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.

I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.

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

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

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

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

Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking.

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

I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.

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

How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?

Are police forces faster to solve or avoid crimes due to surveillance at least ?

No government or enforcement agency will ever say no to more power.

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state

I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.

You're accepting and normalizing deviancy through learned helplessness rather than rebelling and protesting it.

It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.

And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.

Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.

And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????

There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.

Frankly this is the least of the problems we have.

There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.

And yet, crime is doing fine. This tells you what the surveillance state is really for.

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

Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.

Also I think that this is just adding face recognition on a already camera-ladden system.

You could be confusing that with cockney slang. ;)

It will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.

Prosperity?

This is never going to fly, and expecting it is waste of time and energy that could have been used more productively.

Think for a second or two about the type of folks who get, succeed and even thrive in politics over decades. Not your regular Joe, not a nice friendly balanced individual. No, biggest fuckups with massive daddy issues, school bullies, unresolvable inferiority complexes, sociopaths to the core, for whom the lure of money and power over others trumps everything else. This is the default, regardless of country. Look at politics through such optics and many things will start to make sense, also one would gain more realistic expectations from those folks.

Now, why would such people ever allow that, to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?

> The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering

Yet the UK doesnt have private systems such as Flock like the US does.

I'm waiting for them to turn every wifi router in 3D tracking nodes that monitor the exact location and body position of everyone nearby in buildings. Its too juicy of target once they get the tech fully figured out.

they already put more people in jail than any other country for expressing the wrong opinions on social networks

If I were to guess, they may have some "test" users (people who are involved in this) who are on the watchlist, they do their regular commutes and see if the system picks them up each time.

For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.

It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook.

At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.

Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.

I don't think it's very scientific, more of a procurement process.

Because I guess if it's not proven to be effective if they use some known test cases, then they won't roll out to the whole network

All due respect but I am not totally against police dealing with protests. I am against this Orwellian surveillance stuff. If you want to police so people can deal with day to day things like go shopping without being harassed or freaked out I am all for that. But do it the old fashioned way.

Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly.

Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"

Is it to ID protestors, or to ID overstayers/other immigrant offenses? Home Office just parked up outside the station waiting for every overstayer to flag instead of just questioning people on walkups?

The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.

How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view.

Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.

> What would be the failure case for the trial?

Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.

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

It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.

If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.

Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.

The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.

> My only issue is getting it in hands of some crazy dictator, but that is another story.

That IS the story though. The kind of offences these cameras disuade pale in comparison with the risk of abuse of power infringed in the 99.999% of innocent people these cameras are pointed at suppose.

I think this refers to the trial.

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

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

i'm pretty sure the majority learned plenty well. But that's not whose in charge is it. Even in democracy, especially in America, it's the billionaires and puritans making these choices.

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

This time is different, they say.

This is the country that can´t stop dingy boats...this despite journalists always being able to be there on time to take pictures for the Daily Mail...

> The UK already has so much CCTV.

But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.

It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.

This is exactly what happened in Moscow after same tech was launched. It is much 'safer' on streets, since every entrance door and traffic intersection is equipped with cameras now.

But I pick Portugal's approach every time — no public cameras, no dashcams, it is forbidden to record private persons in public without permission.

I love the word "including" there. Yes it will be used for people suspected of minor crimes but it also includes people accused serious crimes as well!

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

This sentence struck me as well. It says what it is focused on, but nothing about what it actually captures.

What I would like to see is something like this:

- The detectors have a per-determined list of suspect faces and only record information when those faces are spotted.

- These detectors keep only a fixed length of recording that is permanently deleted unless it is actively linked to a crime and explicitly held as part of that investigation.

But it says nothing concrete. Just some nonsense about "focus" which doesn't mean anything.

Well, no, this is a group of people who police are actively looking to arrest because they believe they've committed a crime. That's a different thing.

Could? Will.

>> Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.

They've already used facial recognition at protests.

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

They're hoping people read this as the nonsense notion that they'll only scan criminal's faces. Reality is that everyone's face will be scanned, processed and stored.

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

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

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

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

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

Unlike Brazil the movie it's quite hard to actually end up in jail in the UK. The courts lean more towards letting criminals walk.

The concept of the UK "surveillance state" is actually quite overcooked. It's largely based on myth and dramatisation.

BTP probably have a national live feed of railway station cameras. I bloody hope they do, considering it's a rather small, quite centralised police force that covers an enormous rail network, but they are known to have hired "super-recognisers" — skilled CCTV operators — instead.

We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations. (And the most long-term and persistent of those threats was Irish republican terrorism bankrolled by Americans, for that matter)

But British police generally simply don't have a fully-joined up surveillance system.

We are not tracked from door to door by police cameras; the police control relatively few even in London, and none in most towns. I probably cannot walk through the main part of town without passng a council CCTV camera because two of them are used to keep a pedestrianised road safe, but for the most part I don't think I'd pass one at all.

Councils have cameras for various things — parking and traffic enforcement is a nightmare in small old crowded towns — but police don't always have access to these, even.

(They do where I live because there are actually so few police that we — a town of sixty thousand people — nearly ended up without a police station at all.)

There's a network of traffic cameras on motorways and some urban A roads (traffic is a complex problem in the UK) and one assumes the security services have a feed of that and of the railway station cameras. Again: I want them to.

But we simply do not have and never have had a surveillance system even slightly as capable as the USA has apparently begun rolling out with Flock.

Generally speaking I worry that people outside the UK think the surveillance system in "Hot Fuzz" is real. Most of the time if the British police want to see CCTV footage they have to knock on doors and ask, just like anywhere else.

I assume they were always doing it. Now they're doing it above the table so that they can comb through the dataset for petty reasons that don't justify the expense of parallel construction.

Yes, but this instance of it was in the Underground station, whereas previous cases have been in the mainline Network Rail-operated stations.

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

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

You'd be charged under the Computer Misuse act. /i

What does this comment actually contribute? Please go read the guidelines [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You’ll get arrested instead for posting a meme calling out crimes

All that would be left is gait and biometric analysis, as well as any electronic signalling coming from the tracking device everyone carries in their pocket.

I wonder what makes it different than Japan. Japan, also a large island nation with a developed economy, is also socially conservative in most areas—but the people rely on each other to enforce social norms instead of the law. The government is famously hands off, and tends to release statements and public service campaigns about what citizens should do rather than dictating to them what they must do. And the people generally follow the rules!

> UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next...gambling

The UK is banning gambling? Really?

The US pays lip service to some major freedoms but I think the reality is far from that. US police crack down violently on protests and have for a long time. Their police are far more violent and vindictive in general. Several states have porn bans. Fireworks are restricted heavily in many places. You can buy a house and end up with a random group of locals controlling what you can and can't do with it. You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses.

On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.

You assume it will be used in good faith which is charitable. It doesn't even need to take an authoritarian regime to pervert this technology. Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument.

honestly, i've found that it's usually better to not engage in these threads. the likelihood of a good faith discussion is very low. as you point out, it's mostly ideological kneejerk reactions rather than actual discussion based on considered viewpoints. but i'll give it a go.

i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.

so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.

there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.

> Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?

This same argument would apply to Flock cameras, correct?

Literally all normal people on the tube already pay with bank card or Apple Pay and are thus trackable anyway. This just levels the playing field for the barrier pushers.

Innocent of what exactly in whose eyes exactly? Everyone has secrets

The “main character” syndrome is strong here .. thing is, most people wouldn’t even be the main character in a movie about their own lives .. also if this helps catch criminals/terrorists/thieves .. what’s the actual harm to an innocent passenger ..

ps: great initiative by LU

At first this made me upset - why should I be monitored? Then it hit me, years ago we had policemen/bobbies that would essentially do the same thing. Look at people - notice them.

It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.

Hot take, but as long as human dose not need to eat food half of the political problem will be solved.

> as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal

The amount of recent cases in the US is enough for me to not place any faith in the fact that this system would not be abused.

How traffic cameras are used arguably is a big deal.

I mean lets be honest if you are up to no good and there are facial scanners, you'd just throw on your n95 mask and black hoodie, maybe stick a pebble in your shoe, and then poof this tech no longer stops the bad guys.

There are also cases where law enforcement misuses this sort of technology to stalk romantic interests. So your kids could very well be stalked by a pervert in law enforcement more effectively with this technology.

Two things can be true here

1. The UK "surveillance state" narrative pushed in the US is overblown and we do not think about it or care about it as much as Americans do

2. Living in the UK is not "fantastic" for a decent percentage of people. Cost of living is insane.

Those are not exactly high standards to measure against?

Sure… just a post a mean meme and see what happens

Direct classification as bad actor with bad intentions.

I can't speak to other nations, but given the present issues in Britain with two tier policing, they will receive a religious exemption. Which may result in everyone wearing a hijab just for privacy.

If you are about to be watched by an abusive person, it may be better to immediately switch the browser to an innocent page rather than possibly closing it down which may look more suspicious.

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

I don't know UK law but assume they already made that illegal.

winnie the poo?

Why would they need to do anything so explicit and crude? Everyone carries a smartphone on them at every waking moment and they chose to do it willingly (though unwitting of the implications for personal privacy). They are also ready to use them for surveillance almost on a hair-trigger impulse these days. Thankfully this works against state services almost as much as it works against the public, as channels like Crimebodge are able to show us. But the point is that the state already knows what these devices represent to them in terms of data collection, and are subtle enough to avoid making this a mandatory situation... For now.

OK. There's not much antisemitism in London though. It's a major world city.