Police begin operational use of live facial recognition technology in London | Hacker News Reader

Police begin operational use of live facial recognition technology in London

news.met.police.uk

141 pointsborjamoya48 comments

There are a lot of things going on that I find interesting. But one that has caught my attention is the realization that surveillance is a profitable business.

Live facial recognition deployments cost a lot of money. Just in Cardiff alone the police spent 3 million pounds in this technology. And they have more than 25 police officers and with brand new iPads surveilling people in real time. (I was there.)

Imagine how much money they're going to spend in London now. So besides the obvious human rights related questions, the other not so obvious one is: Who is getting these contracts? Where is that money going?

Who is getting these contracts? Where is that money going?

From the official PR, it is NEC Corporation.

https://www.nec.com/en/case/mps/index.html

Metropolitan Police Press Release. http://news.met.police.uk/news/met-begins-operational-use-of...

Don’t worry, none of our senior politicians have a track record of directing public funds to private companies owned by people they’re sleeping with.

who are you referencing here?

Possibly Theresa May, whose husband was involved with a private security company which whilst she was in the home office was the prime candidate for a private police force project

It turned out he didn't own shares in G4S however

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ex9k4n/g4s-theresa-mays-h...

Boris Johnson presumably.

I think the comment above is correctly guessing who Traster was referring to, specifically this controversy:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/boris-johnso...

And who's getting money behind the scenes?

At present, your guess would be just as good as mine. Although, somebody is bound to follow the money and reveal the facts.

Time will tell :-)

> Just in Cardiff alone the police spent 3 million pounds in this technology.

This is and also isn't a lot of money. It's a small amount for an infrastructure project, but it's still 10 pounds per citizen.

You might manage to build a two lane car bridge for that same amount of money. Or a mile of road.

For less than 50 deployments in the small Cardiff City? That's a lot of dough. They were simple tests. Now in London it's going to be fully operational on a daily basis.

Either way, the major concern is how the UK is building a dangerous surveillance state. I mean, I live in London and I can't go around without being watched. And that's just on the streets.

I wish it helped. I had a staff member's motor cycle stolen in broad daylight in London outside the shop. Two guys in helmets grabbed the parked bike, rolled it down the hill to start it and drove away. No result on catching them, everything on camera.

Although the surveillance system might help to solve these crimes, I don't think it is it's main raison d'être

> Who is getting these contracts? Where is that money going?

Stop right there, surveillance should be unidirectional.

More seriously, I wonder if at some time in the future, folks will be able to detect if they are under surveillance? Maybe walk in front of a camera, and see if more ip traffic occurs?

And why is it not going to actual police officers on the streets so they can do their job?

It seems like it is?

>The Metropolitan Police Service announced on ... that it will begin the operational use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology.

>The technology, from NEC, provides police officers with an additional tool to assist them in doing what officers have always done – to try to locate and arrest wanted people

Or are you asking why they don't just hire more police? Because presumably the answer is that you get better savings by augmenting the existing force to be X times more effective than it currently is.

You should also be concerned about who is doing this. The Met were, until very recently, just as bent as the people they were arresting.

Big Brother Watch, the UK campaign group fighting facial recognition has opened a petition to stop the deployment of live facial recognition by the Met Police:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-the-met-police-u...

So where the EU is now weighing a 5yr ban on FR, the UK after Brexit seems to be going full on to adoption?

that is kind of the point of brexit. UK elites have been frustrated at not having the kind of totalitarian control they desire thus far

Wasn't the EU going to impose some financial transparency rules that had the potential to expose Britain's misdoings?

With a little luck they can now do so, and require participation by any potential new trade partners. :)

Oh, I heard about this. Is the same EU where one of the most senior politicians signed over 300 secret deals with corporations to help them avoid hundreds of billions in tax? And we only found out it about decades later, the deals were "off the books", because govt officials leaked it?

The region that is most responsible for tax avoidance is the EU. End. In BOTs, everything is reported (company ownership, beneficial owners, and financial institutions report everything back to home tax authorities). Member states in the EU are engaged in industrial tax avoidance (Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, etc.) and marketed themselves to corporations that way (i.e. they didn't just facilitate it, they caused it). And one big reason why no-one did anything is that the EU was led by (Juncker) the guy who was solely responsible for this (he was signing these deals in the 90s, before Ireland and co. got in on the game).

Are you complaining that the EU was representative of the wishes of its member states by not forbidding national governments from offering favourable tax policies to attract investment, or are you complaining that the EU is somehow making tax avoidance in its member state easier and more common, despite it passing an anti-tax avoidance directive[1]?

The EU enables member states to agree policies which are beneficial when widely adopted despite being detrimental if unilaterally adopted, thus avoiding a "race to the bottom". This sort of dynamic should be expected, given results from game theory like the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Public Goods Game[2].

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/anti-tax-avoidan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game

No...you are just raising points that I didn't raise.

The EU is the centre of industrial tax avoidance. Member states are responsible for assisting corporations (not just facilitating, advertising) in tax avoidance (trillions of dollars have moved out of tax systems as a result). This wasn't to encourage investment...yes, Luxembourg...Amazon has invested so heavily there...is your stupidity deliberate?

The connection with the EU is that the EC was run by the person who had signed a massive amount of those deals. The stuff that has been passed is weak, it probably won't work (nation states have already devised new ways to get round this), and work on transparency (most of these deals were secret) has been blocked by the usual tax havens (this contrasts nicely with the UK where transparency has been adopted in full, the only stumbling block was the inability to force this upon some overseas territories...it was adopted overnight in Jersey/IOM however).

Congrats you have read Wikipedia. What you don't seem to realise is that a "race to the bottom" did occur. Luxembourg did these deals, we now know, in the 1990s then other nations started copying. The EU triggered a race to the bottom globally and it occurred within the EU...but why let reality get in the way of your theories?

Again, we really need to crack down on these rouge tax haven states. Thankfully, the US/UK has led the way on this.

I'm not sure what you mean by that being the point in brexit. Theresa May voted for remain and introduced bills like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

EDIT: your link kind of proves my point:

"On 21 December 2016, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) declared that the generalised retention of certain types of personal data is unlawful, although little is known as to how this will affect the Investigatory Powers Act at this stage."

also my perception is that may and cameron were doing reverse psychology by backing remain

I mean Cameron did put it to a binding referendum with a simple majority. At least part of him was in support of leaving for him to do that.

The referendum was advisory/non-binding.

https://fullfact.org/europe/was-eu-referendum-advisory/

No, he 100% expected a comfortable remain win. He called the non-binding referendum because it was a major manifesto promise. It was a manifesto promise solely as an attempt to shut up the awkward squad -- the extreme Brexit wing of the Tory party, and put them back on the fringe for another decade or so. Then expected another hung parliament and probable coalition, not a majority.

There are plenty of major Tory figures on record confirming this.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-51196849

> Theresa May voted for remain

Allegedly. It was more of a 'agreeing with the government in place at the time'

As a minister, she had to agree with the government. It's called "Cabinet Collective Responsibility"

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

Technically, it was suspended during the 2016 referendum, but was it? Really?

Nah. Had Cameron's gamble paid off, Gove and Grayling would have been out on their ear.

He put down as a stake the future of the country in an internal power struggle. Politics at its finest.

This propensity doesn't have to do with Brexit, we've had signs of the UK moving towards a police state long before it.

They put an exception for security related use

The story as reported by the BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51237665

Url changed from https://twitter.com/bbw1984/status/1220681916543840257, which points to this.

If anyone finds a more neutral and substantive article on this, we can change it again.

Imagine that a so called democratic country like the UK would go down the same road as bad and evil China ...

This is interesting in that it seems like explicitly non-live FR: https://blog.clearview.ai/post/2020-01-23-clearview-is-not-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083775

connect the dots

Banksy was right …

Banksy was glib. It’s different.

We may be losing privacy, but whether we're losing power and freedom is another thing.

It's important to accept a changing world. Luddites have railed against 'immoral' new technologies that will cause the end of the world, time and time again.

This adjustment is going to be hard. I believe privacy is a fundamental human right.

But if technology makes this concept obsolete, then we must adapt.

We may have to change our tune to defending radical acceptance of difference and fighting against thought policing and over-policing of divergent human behaviour - not the mere detection of it. Without the freedom for such creativity and normal humanness, we are doomed.

>But if technology makes this concept obsolete, then we must adapt.

The point of the Third Amendment is that people do lie. Do you trust the King's soldiers to report on the coming and goings around your house truthfully?

Luddites didn't rail against the immorality of technology, they were concerned with capitalists rapidly replacing skilled workers with unskilled workers and reducing wages across the board.

They were not anti-technology and they were typically highly trained workers capable of operating complex pieces of machinery.

It had nothing to do with a sense of 'technology morality' and everything to do with class warfare and standing up for the worker.

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