Real-Time Surveillance Will Test the British Tolerance for Cameras | Hacker News Reader

Real-Time Surveillance Will Test the British Tolerance for Cameras

nytimes.com

The British tolerance for cameras, and other oppressive behaviour by the police, is actually very high. Football fans have been subject to all sorts of illiberal measures ranging from face recognition to passport confiscation for decades. The rest of the public support it because they like order. See also the "ring of steel" London security system and everything related to terrorism.

This is partly why there haven't been any significant anti-Brexit protests; the police have very effectively dismantled the structures from which violence might spring.

A million people on the streets of London doesn't count as a significant anti-Brexit protest? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/23/one-million...

GP's comment is nonsense in a number of ways, most notably that British police are generally regarded among the least oppressive in the world.

Apart from the RUC, the kettling, Orgreave, Hillsborough, the Macpherson report, "sus" laws, and the embedding of undercover officers in environmentalist groups some of whom had children with the people they were surveilling?

The fact that UK police are not routinely armed helps a lot, but they're still capable of some highly selective treatment of people they don't like.

Has it changed anything? Like the Iraq war protests, the government is capable of ignoring huge protests. Perhaps I should have said "effective" rather than "significant".

Do you think that protest must be violent to be effective?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_hooliganism_in_the_Un...

This comment is just the silly kind of bile that gets spewed on Fox News to convince Americans that countries like the UK and Canada as Dystopian Hellscapes. If you had any cultural context around the history of violent football hooliganism in the UK you might understand why those measures were considered necessary and a re supported by a large part of the public. Also there have been very significant anti-brexit, anti-austerity and anti-trump protests in recent years so I'm really sure what you're talking about there. I can only only assume this is some sort of hand wave to the idea that people in the UK aren't able to protest or express themselves like they are in The Land of The Free (TM).

I'm aware of the violent hooliganism, and they probably deserve to be on the blunt end of some illiberal treatment. That doesn't change the fact that it is illiberal, and involves all sorts of "pre-crime" measures justified by the argument that someone might commit a crime, rather than being imposed as penalties for a crime actually committed.

Really that's the core liberal/conservative policing distinction: the conservative argument is that some people are really bad and that justifies measures taken against them, and the liberal argument is that actions of the police should be judged as acceptable or unacceptable regardless of who those actions are against.

Protest has also changed from the anti-"G8" anti-globalisation days.

> anti-brexit, anti-austerity and anti-trump protests

All those things appear to still be happening despite the protests. I should have said "effective".

The anti-war demonstrations in the UK were the biggest ever seen, and yet we went into Iraq.

What protests are ever "effective"? They're a warning to those in power more than anything else. Usually the repercussions for politicians are felt years afterwards, for example Labour losing elections and Tony Blair being unable to participate effectively in UK politics any more.

Again, not true. It was nothing to do with "pre-crimes". The people who were banned from travelling to Russia had previously been convicted of football violence related crimes.

Also regarding the protests - it really depends on your definition of effective. I don't think anyone thought they were going to topple the Trump presidency by protesting when he visited. They were just expressing that they believed he was not welcome here. And given the media coverage and the comments from the man himself I'd say they were quite effective.

> If you had any cultural context around the history of violent football hooliganism in the UK

If this was a good justification for this kind of measure (abuse) can you imagine what Germany should do given their history? Yet they'd rather go for less divisive solutions.

What if there are better ways to prevent repeating the mistakes of the past that don't involve making even bigger mistakes? But those ways give more power to all people instead of just some people so I can understand why mass surveillance was the go to instead.

> those measures were considered necessary and a re supported by a large part of the public

All slippery slopes start somewhere high and this is all people are shown at first. But it's the bottom you should worry about instead.

Except there's a core of truth in what they say, though I might differ on the point about protests. Football hooliganism was well on the way to being solved by the early 90s. The international ban ended in 1990. It was the seventies and eighties that most would have been hesitant to take the kids along to a match, and the big clubs had scary reputations. Most of the measures since have not been necessary, and most of the fixing of the problem wasn't down to cameras.

Police tactics, ground changes, putting responsibility more on to the clubs, and a good degree of managing the groups of supporters. Companies would once finish early if there was a Wednesday match and their office was even vaguely on a route to the ground. By the nineties and noughties, normality was far more expected.

Far more has been for security theatre and red top media campaigns that the "government must DO something!!!!". So government does do something. Like rings of steel around London. Tanks at airports (huh?) and all the rest. Despite this a man in a van can still perform a terrorist outrage on a bridge, or take a bomb to a teen pop concert.

We're far more likely to hear some days after that some perpetrator was known to police or security services, than all the security theatre prevented some atrocity, or the perpetrator was arrested en route.

> Football hooliganism was well on the way to being solved by the early 90s

I'm not old enough to remember football hooliganism in the 80s and before, but abroad at least, it was very far from solved by the 90s - which is why passports are taken away.

> than all the security theatre prevented some atrocity

Without commenting on how effective any of this is, you won't hear about prevention because it isn't news.

It was probably an order or two of magnitude worse in the seventies and eighties, and somewhat tied in with deprivation and NF racism of those decades. Dutch and British supporters were notorious for it. My father and uncles wouldn't take me to matches as a young 'un. Had they been interested and old enough, I'd have pretty comfortable taking my kids in the nineties.

By the nineties there was just a dwindling hard core minority of hooligans, that were starting to become removed from the clubs. Same for the international element, it had become some thugs being thugs, and mostly separated from grounds, matches and the general support. They tagged along with the footie event, for a good punch up in a city bar or city square. From a point of view of "everyone well behaved" it remained a problem. From a point of view of hundreds or thousands of opposing supporters kicking off, it was mostly solved.

Prevention isn't news, but arresting someone preparing a bomb, or caught on a bus with a machete on their way to wherever is. Yet for all the additional surveillance...

I think the problem is that we have no real way of knowing how many threats have been successfully countered by the security services, and no one knows how many potential bad actors have been dissuaded by them either. So it's easy to call them out as security theatre. People on this thread are talking about the rings of steel like there’s some sort of TSA checkpoint on every road into Greater London. Unfortunately the reality is a lot less exciting. It only surrounds the square mile (a much, much smaller and higher risk area) and is pretty uninteresting. It consists of some ram-raid bollards and police booths that have fallen into a pretty bad state of disrepair. I struggle to see the downside of ram-raid barriers in a pedestrianised area - you’ll note none of the van attacks occurred in the City.

it's the presentation as much as anything else that makes it theatre. Protecting pedestrianised streets from unauthorised traffic with pop up bollards happens in towns and cities everywhere. Presenting it as a terrorism ring of steel does not.

> If you had any cultural context around the history of violent football hooliganism in the UK you might understand why those measures were considered necessary