London Underground is testing real-time AI surveillance tools to spot crime | Hacker News Reader

London Underground is testing real-time AI surveillance tools to spot crime

wired.com

47 pointsBrajeshwar49 comments

I don’t see how AI cameras are a solution to any crime issues in places like tube stations.

The staff at these stations know when people are jumping the turnstiles and evading fares. They know if there is a fight. It’s already recorded on classic CCTV (though with shockingly bad cameras if we are to believe recent news reports).

The issue is not in my mind the detection of crime (especially petty crime). This may or may not improve the detection of crime, with a cost to civil liberties and loads of false positives.

I don’t know if increasing detection of more minor crime is useful if there is not a clear way of being able to respond to the volumes of crime we already know about.

You can’t jail every fare jumper or shoplifter in London. It simply isn’t practical. Even if you did jail them, you’d eventually have to let them go, whereafter they very well might reoffend, as they would be more desperate than before their incarceration.

My wife had her phone stolen recently, in Highbury and Islington tube station. Nothing to be done, by the time she noticed it gone, it was too late. However since then, she's been getting messages from the perps that appears like a message from Apple, with a link that takes you to a surprisingly convincing site, that then asks you to enter your pin. It's clear that not everyone falls for this sort of ploy, but enough do to make it worth the thief's time to steal it, and sell it for parts otherwise.

There are a lot of moving parts to this sort of crime- Apple don't make it easy for you to profit from a locked iPhone, and Android probably don't either. Someone able to write and maintain a convincing-looking website and forward recorded data, someone to take the phone, someone to manage the operation etc etc. Finding out who is stealing the phones would be very helpful in stopping this sort of thing from happening, by cracking the organisations involved.

I get the privacy arguments, but if this does actually help stop thieves, on balance I'm in favour.

>I get the privacy arguments, but if this does actually help stop thieves, on balance I'm in favour.

News check, it doesn't. London Met has faced severe cuts over the past decade, it's focusing the core team on major crimes, while hiring a volunteer force for the petty stuff like these. The volunteer force can't be arsed to fight a fly, much less catch a gang of pickpockets.

News check, the Met doesn’t police the underground - that’s the job of the British Transport Police, a completely different force.

>while hiring a volunteer force

Nonsense. If you’re talking about specials then they have been kicking about since the late 1800s.

The proportion of duties allocated to the volunteer force has increased much more than what it used to be back then.

I don't mind having the volunteers for duties such as traffic assistance and the like. But right now, it looks like a return to the Bow Street runners era is inevitable.

If the people were collectively serious about stolen cell phones, the only solution that remotely makes sense is to lean on APPLE et al.

The things are nearly perfect tracking devices. It's absurd to not understand that Apple et al could easily (from a technical sense) eliminate cell phone theft.

Well they are trying arent they?

1. Locking phone with "find my" enabled so they can't be reset without enterring your passcode/password.

2. Pairing components to the phone so the phones physically cant be stripped down and components resold.

3. Recently adding a feature to allow you to require touchid/faceid to wipe the phone to prevent a situation where the phone and pin code/password is stolen.

What else should they do?

Not much, especially since much of this makes repair etc more difficult. Although maybe they could force iPhone in lost mode to loudly and constantly announce they miss their human, like a lost dog?

>It's absurd to not understand that Apple et al could easily (from a technical sense) eliminate cell phone theft.

I think the option to make the lost iphone make noise is there in the "find my" menu. So if you have another Apple device like a mac, watch, ipad etc. you can locate it using the airtag network (ie. not requiring cell service), have it make noise, or remote wipe it.

Start with...

Once a phone is reported lost or stolen, have it record everything and post that somewhere. To the cops would be nice, but also might be overwhelm them.

No problem, make a subreddit or something and post everything there, etc.

Now I may be missing something from the above, but whatever I havent thought of, I'm certain Apple could. I'm certain Apple could come up with a protocol that would make a stolen iPhone 100% useless, to the point that it would be a near perfect deterrent and thefts would go to basically zero.

But I'm also certain that Apple will not do that because $$$$$.

>Once a phone is reported lost or stolen, have it record everything and post that somewhere. To the cops would be nice, but also might be overwhelm them.

I believe you can track the device using the "Find My" app. It utilizes the Airtag network instead of cell towers so does not need cell reception but does need the phone to have battery charge.

>No problem, make a subreddit or something and post everything there, etc.

What are you ever talking about?

>Now I may be missing something from the above, but whatever I havent thought of, I'm certain Apple could. I'm certain Apple could come up with a protocol that would make a stolen iPhone 100% useless, to the point that it would be a near perfect deterrent and thefts would go to basically zero.

The protocol is the above. In the above scenario, the phone can't be unlocked meaning if someone tries to sell it all you need to do is power it on and see the "icloud LOCKED" message with no recourse other than to unlock it.

Furthermore the parts are useless since they are tied to that device. So the only value is the metal scrap or maybe you could resell the case and or parts that haven't been serialized yet (battery?). I know the screen, face/touch id sensor and a few other parts are serialized.

>But I'm also certain that Apple will not do that because $$$$$.

Pretty sure Samsung/Android does not have all of those security features above so I guess they are even more greedy? $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

> I get the privacy arguments, but if this does actually help stop thieves, on balance I'm in favour

Or adjust how one carries their phone/belongings in super busy high theft areas. I bet your wife is now going to act accordingly. Better this than offloading awareness to more intrusive government surveillance.

A lot of crime detection in the UK are done for the statistics, not prevention.

As in, show enough stats that show numbers going up makes the desire for more legislation and civil rights squashing more palatable?

With enough big brother surveillance you could completely automate it. Recognize people jumping the turnstile and automatically mail out a fine to them with no human in the loop like they do with cars. Now plenty of people are going to challenge it in court but many wont and will probably pay up.

Crime always has a direct link to poverty. I don't care what kind of pedantic argument about stealing luxury goods I get in response.

Its basically impossible to stop crime as long as poverty allows mental illness, addiction, and disease to go unchecked. The only solution that doesn't improve the poorest's lives materially is just mass imprisonment, camps, basically Nazi style undesirable removal.

It's extremely silly and unserious to claim AI could ever "stop crime". Just a grift by those investing wasted hours into LLMs claiming they're magic.

Crime crosses all paths of life. Typically the rich will commit different crimes, but crime crosses all levels of economics. If you are rich it isn't worth stealing a candy bar (but some still do it for the rush), but you get the opportunity to embezzle large sums of money that the poor often don't even have access to (they might or might not if they did)

AI surveillance is definitely bad but are you also implying we shouldn't stop or punish crime and instead just focus on solving poverty? Even if all crime is a symptom of poverty surely we should try to stop and punish the crimes while trying to solve poverty.

>> I don’t see how AI cameras are a solution to any crime issues in places like tube stations.

I doubt this is really about detecting crime. This seems more about manpower and camera/watcher ratios. The machine will identify situations and bring them to the attention of the human, allowing one person to "man" a larger number of cameras.

Some airports have a similar system for cameras whereby cameras will automatically pan and zoom towards the source of an issue, saving the time necessary for a human to spot an incident. Some are even tied into ground-mapping radar to identify when aircraft or objects are in places they shouldn't.

https://www.vision-systems.com/cameras-accessories/article/1...

I think the endgame is going to be automatic penalties deducted from universal credit or added to payroll tax via the tax code.

This is a great point. I'm not sure about London but in NYC, SF, and many other big cities in the US there just isn't the will to intervene. A strong police presence that intervenes just isn't the goal. I don't really know what goal this furthers.

They're looking at the wrong end of the problem - you can implement all the tech you like, but ultimately you'll run into the Slough of Despond of the so-called British Justice System.

[Alleged] perps will wait months to get to trial only to be either acquitted on a technicality, or be handed a derisory "slapped wrist" fine/sentence. If the former they'll be able to pay in instalments. If the latter, it'll most likely it'll be suspended or reduced to Community Service.

Sad but true. Anyone wanting to learn more about how dysfunctional the UK's justice system is after years of underfunding should read Secret Barrister[1]. For comfortable technology folks who seldom brush with the law it's eye-opening stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Barrister

It will probably work well at its real purpose, breaking up protests and identifying any protestors to have their bank accounts frozen. No coincidence they're planning to make mask wearing at protests illegal at the same time.

I was informed in 2020 that COVID can't spread at protests, so it only makes sense to make masking illegal there.

As long as poverty remains a primary cause of various crimes, employing extensive technology will not eliminate criminal activities and behaviors that endanger lives.

I was in London this week and encountered these 'Amazon Fresh' grocery stores for the first time. You walk in, somehow they track your movement through the shop and know what items you have picked up (or put back), and then when you leave you scan your membership card and they charge all the purchases to your account.

So effectively they've solved the shoplifting problem. If you are not a member then you have no business being in the store.

tons of issues with the amazon go concept to fix from the tech side

> The Just Walk Out system requires a considerable number of staff to oversee manual reviews and enable the system to work. For example, while the process—from the consumer’s perspective is cashierless—Amazon still needs staff on the backend to review video footage of the transactions to “facilitate pricing and payment.” In fact, Amazon initially set out to use roughly 20 to 50 employees per 1,000 sales by mid-2022. But quickly realized that figure was too low and ended up using up to 700 employees during that timeframe.

https://www.paymentsjournal.com/amazons-just-walk-out-tech-f...

So social graph and hobbies/passions is not enough to monetize, they want all your shopping history, habits, quirks etc., on camera to be analyzed to death? Nobody sees this as privacy and security problem in 2024?

I get that Bezos is an obsessive penny-pincher and thats part of his success (and fucked up persona that leaves a lot to be desired), but please allow me to politely say Hell fuck no, I'll give premium to competition that just doesn't have this. I can't imagine this being OK in EU, but then again we don't talk about EU standards here anymore. I wonder what makes British population OK with this, its not like we talk about former East Germany.

But retailers in some places are having to shut down stores because theft is so high and the law is not enforced and for some reason private security is not an option.

Perhaps it's time to reread Gnomon.

That book was intriguing, it made less and less sense to me the more it continued. I should give it another read

Such a good book, though ultimately not that much about surveillance?

You're right that its not, but the Inspector sure has an impressive surveillance apparatus at their disposal. To me it felt like the aspirational endgame that the powers that be would like to see for the UK, basically.

Now we only need a safe definition of crime.

curious to see how long it takes a dance troupe to fool AI into sending riot teams after a street performance.

"China's facial recognition won't be rolled out in Western countries..."

> They also say the system generated alerts for “rough sleepers and beggars” at the station’s entrances and claim this allowed staff to “remotely monitor the situation and provide the necessary care and assistance.”

ah yes I love using technology to better deny the most vulnerable people a place to sleep.

It seems fairly obvious to anyone in London that recorded announcements are frequently triggered by events on the platform.

Someone walks too close to the platform edge; "Please stand behind the yellow line at all times!"

Someone lights-up or vapes; "All stations are non-smoking areas!"

--- and so on.

These are probably done by humans watching the cameras and just lazily pressing the corresponding announcement button. But one gave me real cause for concern, and it seemed obvious that "AI" was involved;

A woman was pushing someone in a wheelchair, and left their disabled friend for a moment to look at a map on the wall.

"Please do not leave luggage unattended at any time!"

The message kept repeating until the woman walked back over to the wheelchair. I hoped the person in the wheelchair was also deaf, because what could be more dehumanising than being wrongly labelled as "luggage" by a machine.

Don't worry, in the future they'll just auto mail a fine for abandoning luggage to your last known address based on facial recognition instead of calling you out.

"care and assistance", in Tory Britain means they can send some bored police officers to destroy your tents and other stuff, no?

The place to sleep isn’t the station. There are shelters, rehab centers and mental health facilities. Minimum wage jobs are easy to get. There are plenty of social workers that will help you get set up with these things.

These things always disproportionately target non-Caucasian individuals, so queue future outrage article. See how well it worked out for Rite Aid, here in the U.S.

It's London. It's going to exclusively target the poor and vulnerable, e.g. the homeless.

And you say this based on what exactly?

In his comment he said London, implying this was taking place in Britain.

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