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Comment by borjamoya | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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