Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
news.sky.com
Related: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_facial_recognition/
news.sky.com
Must be a truly dangerous place...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
But it's not you that decides that what you are doing is harmless. It's what the authorities decide; and that can be quite different from what you or other people deem "nothing to hide".
because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys
there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)
like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it
and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).
And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.
and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?
anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.
Well. Maybe[0].
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
Isn't that the CC in CCTV? Closed circuit implies that it's restricted to an on prem network
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
The cynic in me almost wonders if when it comes to re-election time, these increased numbers in terrorist charges will be trotted out and the context conveniently forgotten.
Terrorists (as well as their supporters) are intolerant and non-pluralist. Therefore, for a pluralist society to survive, it must be intolerant of one thing- intolerance.
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way to force. If he was only talking about force in response to force it wouldn't be considered a paradox I don't think. This quote hasn't dispeled popular characterizations of his stance for me, it seems in line with what most people say he's saying.
However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
I'd at least like to know who defines who is a "Pluralist" and who is a "Terrorist".
Also: The paradox of tolerance can legitimately be used to call intolerant behaviors of individuals. When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
> When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant"
There are suitable cases, eg. if you are in jihad or other extremist sect where part of ideology is intolerance
If you need exceptions, abandon the rule, because it is no longer a rule, it is just a discriminatingly applied proscription.
Suppose there was an organization that had written by-laws which were not permitted to be changed but which demanded adherence (on pain of death), including never leaving the organization. Also suppose that most of the members of that organization collectively decided not to adhere to all of its rules (some were considered incompatible with "progress")... but some continued to. And others sometimes began to, but only under stress, because the by-laws book (which, again, cannot be changed, on pain of death) made NO clarification on scope of application, and people were free to interpret the by-laws literally.
Why would you not judge that organization, given that its by-laws are its core? Why would you make special exceptions for ANY organization (or its members), here?
I mean, objectively-speaking, if we weren't reflexively defending the org we're of course discussing, it sounds like a dystopian science-fiction novel. (If I'm being honest, it sounds A LOT like Warhammer, actually.)
Here's a fun thing to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(tafsir)
"With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated, with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500."
Also note that naskh tends to recognize later passages as overriding earlier passages. Guess which ones are the more violent ones...
See a problem, yet? Please don't gaslight me into not seeing one.
If someone does not abode by the terms of the contract, they are not covered by it.
In other words, the intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.
Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance will NOT be tolerated.
Obligatory legal notice that I obviously do not support said group, but historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objectives. N one I've spoken to feels even remotely terrorised by Palestine Action, and it wouldn't even make sense to be given what they stand for.
I say this as someone who neither supports Palestine Action or shares their concerns.
https://news.sky.com/story/prisoners-to-be-released-after-se...
Spraying paint down military jet engines rendering them inoperable until repaired, at a cos of millions of pounds.
> historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objective
The legal definition of terrorism in the UK has for many years (at least all of the current century, I think a lot longer) included "serious damage to property":
https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism
and I think causing many millions of pounds worth of damage is clearly serious.
I do not entirely agree with the definition (I particularly oppose making collecting information and disseminating publications terrorism) but it is what has long been accepted.
The Terrorism Act 2000 gives "serious damage to property" as one definition of terrorism so I find it hard to argue that the government was doing anything more than neutrally applying the law here. Those protestors knew full well they were supporting a proscribed group and they were warned what the consequences would be. Protesting in support of Palestine remains entirely legal in the UK just as long as you don't use the name and branding of this one specific group.
I'll probably regret posting this but there are some extremely disingenuous half-truths in this thread and I think that readers should know the full context.
The UK has very broad terrorism legislation, but conventionally terrorism is something directed at civilians, and it's not something we usually tar, for example, resistance groups with.
I think you even have to be able to kill people in internal political conflict without being called a terrorist. There are many circumstances during which such things are necessary.
If the government wants to shut this group down (which I think is a reasonable response to an attack on our military) then I'm not sure what other options were available to them. And like I said, what they did seems to meet the legal definition of terrorism (regardless of whether that definition is a good one.)
Of all the arguments we could be having about Palestine, I'm really not going to shed any tears for Palestine Action.
But I'm not here to get lost in the weeds, I just objected to the misleading half-truths that were being presented above. Most people reading this don't follow UK news closely and might come away with the impression that the government is banning pro-Palestine protest entirely, or is making it illegal to merely "hold placards". That's an outrageous distortion, and it hardly helps the pro-Palestine cause. I couldn't let it slide.
Furthermore, I think that there is a duty, if one suspects that a capability is or may be used to aid genocide, to destroy that capability. Hopefully Palestine Action are incorrect, and targeting assets that have not been used to aid genocide or otherwise make it easier, but if they are right and the UK have actually aided genocide, then they have done too little violence.
Yet more false equivalence.
You can be for Palestine.
You can be for Hamas.
You can be against ethnic cleansing.
You can be against genocide.
These are all different things. And note, this smearing of things like equating 'genocide to Hamas so they deserve it' doesn't make genocide better.
This smearing terms together is also being done by Israel as well, by trying to equate Israel with Judaism, and all Jews across the world. And that any denouncing of actions done in a genocide or ethnic cleansing is somehow antisemitic.
All of these false equivalence arguments are basically just motte-and-bailey fallacies.
Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Last elections too. For quite many, Hamas are freedom fighters defending against invaders.
I don't have anything else to nitpick about your comment! Just that one thing you said stuck out, because, no; being for Hamas is like being for the Khmer Rouge. Like, yeah, western imperialism in Indochina was absolutely a thing at the time of the Khmer Rouge. But no, you don't get to be for the Khmer Rouge!
("Last elections too"? What did you mean by that?)
Per-capita it’s less than the US.
By the way, do anybody care what would happen (at least psychologically) in case of a massive blackout or cyber-incident?
Just imagine something akin to what happened to the Iberian peninsula a few months ago, the country goes into flame quickly preventing recovery and then it's on. Most of the systems the UK has to control its population are inoperable.
I am pretty sure it is in the back of the mind of the UK leaders when they negotiate with Russia and China....
More than got away with it, actually... they prospered.
There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You have to give people a way to reduce government's power if the government does something the people don't like, but do it in a way that keeps society from flying apart.
The best solution i can think of is constantly seeking to reduce the government and limit it's power, size and responsibilities, always trimming the hedge. I.E. conservatism. Any government fundementally should be trusted and relied upon as little as possible, if you want to prevent abuses.
Why would we work down the prosperity chain?
There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation. Building a Feudal Economy.
And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.
There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
This is very wrong, in the sense that not everyone can do "financing/services". Lots of people, even some on this website in fact, pretend that everyone can but it just isn't true. What financializing your economy does is exacerbate existing inequalities, or build new ones where they didn't exist.
It's also, ahem, a very bad idea to intentionally deconstruct your industrial base so you can make a couple bps every quarter. The reasons for this should be quite obvious, but since for many they apparently are not ... there are very real geopolitical tensions between PRC and the US, and these tensions present a very real possibility of war. Should that happen, PRC will have the ability to squeeze US supply chains in a very devastating way. This isn't to say it would provide them an easy path to victory, but just the ability to do this increases the probability that they would initiate a conflict in the first place. This is to say that there is no such thing as a "prosperity chain" that everyone should all strive to emulate.
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
Always been that way, always will be. It's just a little harder to bury your head in the sand than it used to be.
Nope. That's an ideology, not a statement of fact. It completely negates the possibility that systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose.
Er, that's exactly what "the purpose of a system is what it does" means.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.
no. you cannot. ever.
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
Both of them then rely on the next step after providing information, following the people who triggered the first layer with CCTV.
If I went into my local CBD right now, and comitted some badass crime. explode a cop car or something we all yearn to do. All the exits are covered. I wont get anywhere walking and covering my face. I can get on a train but the rozzers will know where I get off. Likewise, if I jump in a car, they can track it almost anywhere for the next 100 kilometers.
I dont think the goal is prevention, its the guaranteed catch. Its the body of evidence that starts piling up when you burn cop car 1.
When brisbane introduced the go card system, we had our first arrest based on go card travel data within a month.
Sad really.
>bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
I helped an employer comply like this once. Someone had been brutally killed by a driver. The victim only existed for like 3 frames on the recording. But the cop wasnt interested in that anyway. They had managed to sneak drugs out of their car, into their pocket and then hide them in our garden, mid arrest. Embarrasing for the cop you see. The cop already had the driver on vehicular manslaughter, but thanks to the power of CCTV, they could also add a charge for drug crimes.
It's human to help your friend because they're in need; that's how tribes work. But it's just as human to disparage or sabotage someone who isn't a part of your tribe, to not care about them. To lie and cheat and be corrupt.
As for police effectiveness; there are shady groups of people that hang out in dark alleys in some central London areas every single weekend. You need only walk around/down the wrong place to meet them. All it takes is sting operations where a plainclothes officer acts drunk and hits a "get 'em, boys" button to bring in the fuzz when they inevitably get attacked.
There are all sorts of socio-economic-political issues that contribute to all this, though. But the root problem is in the apathy of the general public, none of us care about anything unless it affects us personally.
You can kinda see that in some parts of the UK still, but certainly lack of staff really affects them; particularly when UK seems to have higher incidences of more violent crimes, more drug related crimes, etc. Turkish gangs shooting little girls in the middle of London.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
Is that true, or first world just became older, not exactly safer?
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
And yet they are still pushing [0]
[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...
Sure GDPR and what not, but they're full of loopholes for allowing government to do what private parties are not.
It would be nice if we removed the security guards for politicans, and if they're not doing bad stuff, they have nothing to fear.
HN has terrible EU Derangement Syndrome:
any time its mentioned here, suddenly there are tens of people lining up to blindly shit on it, usually for laws it hasn't actually passed, or literal anti-truths like your comment, despite the fact that it is consistently passing the best tech-focused laws of any major governmental body anywhere, and the proposed laws that everyone repeatedly loses their minds over have never once actually come to pass. even when they released the DMA and DSA, possibly the two most HN-friendly pieces of legislation of all time, half the comments were attempts at criticism, basically seemingly because people here just love to hate the EU, sans facts
This is simply wrong:
They have banned _live_ facial recognition - and with exemptions such as e.g. for terrorism and other severe crimes, which is becoming quite broad.
They are allowing facial recognition when done after-the-fact for law enforcement. Probably also for petty crimes.
if you're going to change the central focus of your comment, do it in a reply not an edit
Here is an article about live/post facial recognition:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ai-facial-recognition-tec...
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
Dire times. Double standards are in full effect.
Please. Stop falling for the right-wing propaganda.
Germany can be unsafe and US too to the extent they need national guard to get back control
We have another token legislation from EU forbidding private parties to most anything, and carefully inserting loopholes for authorities and government to do as they please.
True, the restrictions on live facial recognition is a bit more severe for law enforcement than usual.
But: A. It's not something most people here care about a lot. Law enforcement are still allowed to use AI to create a file on every citizen. B. It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.
well thank fuck for that! besides financial self-interest, why would you want private parties doing anything with AI and biometrics whatsoever? if anyone is to at all, it should be publicly accountable bodies that aren't operating based on a profit motive, but really it should be none at all!
>It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.
this entire sentence stinks of "I just don't like the EU and I'm just going to criticise it no matter what". people in the know? people who have read the law specifically stating that facial recognition can only be used in severe, clearly-defined cases, with judicial approval, in highly time-limited windows? people who've read that if it is to be used post-hoc, it has to have judicial authorisation linked to a criminal offence. and you're saying that this in no way protects privacy?
the UK is rolling out AI police vans all over the country to try and recognise people they have on lists. no judicial approval is required, there's no time-limit, and as far as I'm aware there's no restriction on what crimes it's used for either. private companies are allowed to use it, obviously equally with no judicial approval
essentially mate, I think you need to have a good look at whether your opinions here are coming from "I genuinely think the EU's legislation is an issue here" or "I don't like the idea of the EU in general and I'm going to criticise anything it does"
I can't really begin to fathom how this is good.
"Private parties" are mighty multinational enterprises with essentially limitless pockets, entities whose factual power and political influence rivals most governments. Countries all over the world have been struggling to restrain them for the past decade in order to keep their sovereignty.
What exact "interests and ideas" do you have that would involve the necessity for public facial recognition? Because I, for one, don't want my biometric data in your system without my explicit consent.
"Private parties" refer to non-governmental entities, such as individuals or businesses. You may be acting on a governments behalf, but I am not.
> I, for one, don't want my biometric data in your system without my explicit consent.
If it's a single individual watching (for example) the sidewalk in front of his house and not disseminating the data in any way then what does it matter? Where is the potential downside? There are plenty of neighborhoods with at least a few retirees sitting staring out the front window for multiple hours each day.
As far as I can tell in the vast majority of cases surveillance only becomes problematic when both ubiquitous and centralized.
Or at least just say that straight instead of surrounding it with empty verbiage. The overwhelming proportion of people all over the world don't care about the EU until it does a horrible (or a good) thing, and then they care about the thing it did and why it might have done it. It's not their ex-boyfriend.
People are trying to figure out why it's run by crazy people now, and they blame this on the fact that it is largely an undemocratic organization run by extreme multi-generational elites with a quickly lowering opinion on human rights, freedom of speech and the importance of peace. This is not personal. The EU is not a person.
The EU courts have sometimes been helpful, but the EU lawmakers have been atleast as bad as the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
As other comments have pointed out the EU has also pushed a lot of other privacy invasive legislation.
As shocking as this is, it's not _surprising_
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
Are you a local?
Anyway, on the cameras you're spot on. I do wonder how much UK cameras are used though - like a microcosm of our national potential, the cameras have potential but how often are they really used: half are likely faulty, most have the person monitoring them on a tea break when something happens and it seems to need an extreme act of violence before they get used in earnest.
Our Jub mugs were mostly transfer printed. We had coloured ones and ones with a sort of silvery monochrome effort.
I'm not too sure that the meme that the UK is the most monitored nation in the world is too true.
You probably remember 1984. I went to a jolly posh school in Devon (Wolborough Hill School, Newton Abbot) and we had to discuss 1984 in 1984.
Do you feel too monitored? I suspect that monitoring is under-reported elsewhere.
https://live.staticflickr.com/2314/2171185463_92a40441ab_b.j...
The Brits have been going full steam ahead for many decades.
>it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
No
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I’ll let you figure out who’s quote that is
This is important, because if your point ever becomes a significant argument against the Online Safety Act, it is likely that the government will be able to retort that it was the online services voluntarily censoring - conveniently ignoring, of course, the context which you and I know of.
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
No Sharron I don't want to hear the gosip about your extended family as you talk on speaker with your sister about your trailer trash cousins. And Jack I don't want to hear your shitty political podcast with their hosts room temperture IQ...
Also it's very rude (in British terms, so it's off-the-charts for me).
Basically sometime around the 00s-10s, seemingly everyone decided to become a massive dickface with zero concept of social cohesion, and it's just me me me me me me, and fuck everyone else.
Society needs a reset, pretty much everyone has just become vile, angry and inconsiderate / extreme main-character syndrome.
We shouldn’t be surprised society has fallen.
In the real world things seem to be pretty much the same as they have been for most of my life (and I am 60 in a few months).
Online, yes some people behave like monsters and occasionally some of that bleeds across into the real world - but overall I think we are pretty far from saying that "society has fallen".
Callous anti-social phone behavior isn't just the prerogative of teens.
The more disruption there is in society, the more people seem willing to accept increased control by authorities. I'm not necessarily saying this is part of some grand plan, but it does seem convenient for politicians when circumstances justify stronger control measures.
My measuring stick is how “on message” the people reporting it tend to be. A real disaster or crisis is chaotic, and authentic reporting about it tends to be too (think about mixed messaging during the early days of COVID). If something happens and there’s a very clear narrative from the start about who the good guys and bad guys are, especially if it is trying to make me scared or mad, I just assume I’m being manipulated.
There is always a danger that the ruling class may not stay in power forever, unless the others are nailed to the ground.
No but the people have become so alienated and afraid as to demand it anyway.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24076378.just-17-per-cent-....
The media was the main culprit. When an article comes out they would use words that make one surveillance sound dystopian and the other sound vigilant.
The end result is that surveillance in the west has been scoring small wins under the radar and what’s happening in the UK is the “breaking stealth” of a surveillance state.
Had people just seen surveillance as surveillance none of this would have happened.
Factually, objectively false. Nobody thinks of Taiwan as having a surveillance state (or being evil along other axes), yet they're overwhelmingly (95%) Han Chinese - which is more Han Chinese than China itself. If there was any racism in these opinions whatsoever, then the people making statements about the PRC surveillance state would project the same beliefs onto Taiwan. That they don't is more than enough to prove your blatant lie completely false.
The fact is that the Chinese surveillance is just factually different than western surveillance and people are acknowledging this as true, to the point where people like you have to lie about racism to emotionally manipulate people because they can't argue their points from reality.
Making up falsehoods out of thin air is bad enough, but next time you do it, you'll save yourself personal embarrassment if the lie is at least somewhat plausible instead of dismissable with a 30-second trip to the internet.
In the case of the UK they've often also been operating in collusion with state forces, see: Northern Ireland.
Rather than dangeours, society became dumber in a sense. overload of data resulted attemps to summarize or even make anything binary (I'm Pro X or Anti X).
(the text below is opinionated so please be forgiving :) )
I can name multiple countries (as I'm coming from one) that makes more "reforms" that has or will hurt human rights. (and we're still talking only on the "western world" which suppose to aim for freedom and human rights).
Coming from such a complex place in the world, I sadly say, that looking at stages in my life, I can easily remember the "good'ol'days" where there was one horrible thing, but I didn't know it can get worse.
I do hope society (and brits in the context of the above), will find the right balance to make a balance between feeling secured and invading privacy.
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
Having said that, I don't think the surveillance state they're setting up even has the intent to change any of that.
> The police collected bags of clothes the girl had saved as evidence, but lost them two days later. The family was sent £140 compensation for the clothes and advised to drop the case.
How about instead of attacking credentials we attack the arguments, you know, with evidence? Or, if your best defence is saying "your ideas/evidence come from unsavoury sources (to me)" maybe your positions are more reflective of your own biases than reality.
The accusation that immigrant men from Muslim backgrounds are sex offenders is a well worn trope pushed by the far right and people like Farage and Yaxley-Lennon
If you actually look at crime statistics in the UK sex offenders, including grooming gangs are overwhelming white men — if you look closer you often find that a reasonable proportion of people on the far-right have convictions for sex offences
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/14/grooming-gangs...
3.7% of sexual abuse cases involved group based abuse
Asian or British Asian people account for 5% of offenders while making up 9% of the British populatiin
I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.
"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
Criminals might be deterred by knowing that people definitely get arrested in a certain location, because, say, they've seen it themselves, or because they see a presence of law enforcement, or because they innately sense its a high status environment where law enforcement response is to be expected.
A criminal seeing a sign might conclude that the sign is actually telling them that no immediate law enforcement response is likely.
For example, in London, you dont see CCTV signs in the shops along Sloane Street (super high end retail) but you definitely see them in Primark (very ordinary store, like US Kohls).
Wonder if there are any studies on this?
China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online. And apparently Chinese courts even limited facial recognition (no clue how it'll work in practice though). [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-says-facial-recogni...
How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.
It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:
1. https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/chinas-system-of-mass-arbitr...
2. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/china/hong-kong-security-arre...
You can get arrested for "picking quarrels" online:
3. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3146188/pic...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr548zdmz3jo.amp
[2] https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
He did it to kill any chance of the state improving the train/tram network so that Tesla cars would have less competition for public transport
You might ask "why don't they just re-bid the contract?" Answer: The new 'progressive' city government is opposed to building a train for 'rich people' since there's already a non-express metro that goes through some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Of course no businesspeople use it and they all take Ubers (many of which are Teslas)
The last time I took the Blue Line to the airport it was indeed fast and convenient - but dealing with luggage was kind of annoying, and there was a guy smoking weed on the train. If I were traveling for business there's no way I would use the Blue Line unless it was peak rush hour, and indeed most business travelers don't. Getting weed smoke on your work clothes is a less than ideal way to start a trip, nor is getting sweaty in your work clothes from hauling luggage around the station.
Thus the case for an express train - it would capture those price insensitive business travelers. You could charge $20 a ticket and it would still be a significant savings over Uber. Heathrow Express in London is like this and it seems to work well.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
It's conceptually pretty similar to cell tower dumps, where they ask for all data from a cell tower during a particular time frame. This was recently ruled unconstitutional (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...), but they used it for like 15 years before that (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-d...). I can imagine blanket car footage dumps working for a similar amount of time.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter
> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US
This makes it seem like the entire UK is an urban sprawl, evenly monitored, which it isn’t.
In London you’re likely to be on someone’s camera pretty much all the time, much less so in suburbs and smaller towns. There is plenty of countryside, woodland, rural land and villages where there is no CCTV coverage at all.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-t...
That's statistics for London, not the rest of the UK.
I'm confused as to how that isn't also "surveillance".
Being able to know where someone is on your city sure seems like it fits the bill to me, unless you're considering it "enforcement" (and different from surveillance)?
But CCTV doesn’t act as a deterrent like a bobby on the street would. And because there’s a lack of visibility of criminals being caught, it just feels like the police are doing nothing.
If they’re caught down the line it’s unlikely you’d hear about it anyway. The police can’t tell you without it being proven in court unless essentially caught red-handed, and even if proven successfully that could be months or even years away.
Unfortunately, it’s impractical for them to track down your stolen items without investing much more time than the value of those goods (though I would rather they did that than, say, arrest hundreds of peaceful protestors).
This isn’t unique to the UK; my house was raided when I lived in another country and the police attitude was only to record the theft and assume it was gone for good. It really hurts and makes you feel unsafe but I doubt the police force in any major city in any country will spend time looking for stolen goods after a break-in.
(I’m not saying that the surveillance aspect isn’t a very real problem.)
not if the police cant be bothered to investigate. they dont bother with anything non-violent.
If the CCTV gives a clear and obvious result they will pursue it. If there’s a string of thefts they will investigate and use the CCTV to provide evidence. CCTV won’t always provide that but sometimes it does.
What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
I just want to point out that theft can be violent. In England and Wales, burglary is considered to be a more severe crime if house was occupied, due to the psychological effects on the victims.
The famous 'phone-snatching' can hardly be considered non-violent either, given that it requires physical contact and is almost guaranteed to produce fear in the victim. (I don't personally know how it has been prosecuted - if at all - in the past though.)
And how are you defining "clear and obvious"? Because unless the robber writes his name and address on some paper and holds it to the camera, it wont get investigated mate.
> What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
Which is exactly what I said, they dont bother with non-violent crime. But if laptops arent worth investigating, they should make stealing one legal, or at the very least tell the public they cant be bothered with laptops. Because I was under the impression you could ring the police to enforce the law, not just the parts they deem "worth police time"
I didn’t say it would help in every case, it might even be a tiny proportion of cases, but court records show CCTV recordings are used as evidence, so it happens.
Is that number of crimes it helps solve worth the trade-off in personal freedoms? That’s where we are now.
> But if laptops arent worth investigating, they should make stealing one legal, or at the very least tell the public they cant be bothered with laptops.
That’s hyperbole and also a misreading of what I said.
The chance of recovering a laptop once stolen is close to zero. If the police attempt to track down the stolen item they will most likely not find it, it is literally a waste of their time. Best you can hope for is that they find a stash of them in future and can identify yours.
If they have a lead on who did it, they will focus on the culprit. Or they may choose to focus on prevention, if they think it will reduce the chances of it happening again. Or they may have nothing in which case they can do nothing.
Either way, if your laptop’s been nicked (as mine was) then you’ll get no catharsis, even if they catch the guy who did it. It sucks, but there isn’t a practical alternative.
The police cannot guarantee every crime get solved and it’s unreasonable to expect that. That is not the same as saying that they have no effect at all, that they don’t reduce the number of robberies that take place, or that you might as well make theft legal.
Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
It’s (nominally) a union of states after all
Also, for better or for worse it helps that almost everyone speaks English everywhere.
The US is over 2 times larger by land.
Population is about a quarter smaller. Still, Massachusetts has more people than Denmark, New York has the same as Romania, California has more people than Poland.
Our original founding documents cite "these united states", interestingly and very tellingly "these", not "the." States are their own entities, and you'd find many to have very different cultures and laws — probably the same level of variance you'd find in the EU.
But European countries are much more different from one another than the States are. I think it's actually quite a challenge to doing business there - growing into another country means you have to appeal to a very different culture, deal with different laws, speak a different language.
The US states have their differences but there's a reason they're part of the same nation.
What in the world are you talking about? The US has all of this internally. If on the one narrow point you want to claim that EU has open-borders to the rest of the world, no you don't and that's not something that's good to have anyways. Both US and European citizens are fighting their own governments to decrease immigration as polling shows large opposition to current immigration levels for many years now. A big part of the crackdown on speech in the UK is to restrict criticism of immigration policy.
A better example would be Americans being able to travel freely to USMCA countries.
The rearmament initiative is particularly concerning. Over the past three years, communities in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany have been devastated by flooding, wildfires, etc. Rather than prioritizing investment in resilient infrastructure, leaders are channeling resources into rearmament to confront Russia and China (or so they say - since they are acting as clowns anyway no one really pays attention). My concern is that these weapons may ultimately be used by Europeans against one another; It happened twice already.
[^1]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/temporary-border-controls-to...
[^2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-europe-...
What usually is that they spend a few hundred millions in consultancy and plans. And then off we go for the next round :-)
If you mean liberty as in Human Rights, it waxes and wanes. Broadly speaking in the EU in the 90s/00s human rights were improved and expanded. The European human rights courts were strengthened, more laws passed aimed at opposing discrimination. And the Human rights act in the UK was codified into law in 1998, for example.
The pendulum is presently swinging the other way, mainly due to a populist revolt against mass migration to Europe. It also doesn't help that mass surveillance has become so cheap and an easy way for politicians to be 'tough on crime'. Plus American tech treats privacy as a revenue model rather than a right, and that bleeds into policy expectations via lobbying.
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
Hard to take the rest of your post seriously as that is EU history 101. Pre-101 really, they teach it to teenagers.
In reality, the ECHR was effectively toothless before the 1990s. It's no coincidence you single out dates in the 1990s in both this and your earlier post. It's no coincidence virtually every major bit of leading European human rights jurisprudence is dated from the 90s onwards. It's no coincidence that there was a marked growth in state- and quasi-state institutions in the 1990s. There is an obvious pre-90s and 90s-onwards era of European human rights jurisprudence.
But you already knew this. You yourself correctly singled out the 1990s! You're just trying to hand-wave points you don't like with an argument to authority (and a very strange one, given the authority appears to be... children? And their understanding of the periodisation of human rights jurisprudence? Maybe we should consult European toddlers for their take on the œuvre of Montesquieu, just to make sure we're not missing anything?)
It's kind of striking to observe you reject my point that the human rights narrative is just a story that Europeans tell themselves, on the apparent grounds that that criticism doesn't jibe with the story that Europeans tell their children about Europe. This kind of makes my point.
So long as Europeans cling to fictitious narratives about their having transcended history into some kind of human rights nirvana, they will remain unable to push back on the actual, real decay of their freedoms and societies. Which is the desired outcome as far as elite institutions are concerned, so expect that narrative to be roundly enforced within Europe.
Hashtag celebrating seventy years of the ECHR! So much freedom - insert face here, thank you!
[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
The government prioritises order over law, liquidity over solvency and the status of our politicians at international dinner parties.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR.
Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator.
The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.
If true, wouldn't that simply lead to wanted suspects simply avoiding the cameras, meaning innocent people who aren't monitoring these notifications to have their faces and locations captured, while criminals avoid it?
They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.
A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.
Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
It's about time that idea was crushed and we moved to voting on policies rather than parties and personalities. There isn't a one size fits all party.
> There isn't a one size fits all party.
Seems to be a non-sequitur, there isn't a one-size fits all policy, either.
A good example is the UK Labour party. People want the social side of their policies but not the surveillance. They could have voted for the social policies and against the surveillance. But no we have to eat the surveillance if we want the social policies.
A proportionally representative system in IMO better from this perspective.
The government structure seems to be setup in such a way that any meaningful change is rejected.
Now the same crowd is turning their attention to the ECHR. It won't help.
I think it is a combination of many things. To make meaningful change each one of these entities (quangos) will have to be examined, reformed or reviewed.
I am not sure it is even possible for that to happen without a collapse and/or crisis at this point.
I listened to a podcast with Dominic Cummings last night and he is of the opinion that the UK government is extremely weak at the moment and if there was another black swan event that they would crumble. I don't know if that is true, but it seems plausible.
So that you can write ransom notes? They should have locked you up.
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..
But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
Rome figured this out I think. It didn’t fall. It silently converted into a church. More reach, less defending walls.
I mean, if by small minded you mean "stupid" you're probably right, but I don't think you can mean much else. Unless you've never been anywhere else.
Big thinkers tend to live in wealthy, leafy areas where they don't have to worry about someone jumping over their fence, or appreciate the need for demarcation of land.
Same goes for people who are pro-immigration/pro-drugs/pro-construction - but just don't do it their affluent area.
These same folks went on to figure out the logistics of preparing food. So no, I don't think it's at all axiomatic that the people who disagree with nationalism are necessarily affluent in the slightest. In fact, I've found most solidarity with refugees and anti-nationalist movements in the working class. The overall community of folks I saw ranged across income brackets -- plenty of software engineers, tech folks, trades folks, unemployed folks...
I think that when people say, "They don't really mean it" or "their principles wouldn't stand up if it meant a disruption to their lives", they are not aware of just how much work folks are actively doing every day to live by those principles and invite people in.
telsa> give me the location and names of everyone currently picking their nose, lol.(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887373, but we merged that thread hither)
Neoliberalism's end game.
Replacing police officers is about removing a human decision element from lower class suppression.
We are going to be hearing that argument a lot as the AI police state evolves
But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, being trans drag will, of course, attract immediate attention. But let's not pretend they leave public displays of straight sexuality (including subtle and tasteful) alone). And Morocco and Turkey are absolutely nothing like something like Afghanistan or even Iran.
But in the UK the line is drawn pretty damn far. Are you seriously complaining about that?
I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.
A great quote from an otherwise OK movie ("Anon").
If you actually dig in to the statistics that sometimes get quoted about CCTV in the UK you’ll find that a lot of the numbers have very little foundation.
Have a few at home just for that, but they could definitely have a dual-use.
Or, I've always had trouble looking on the bright side.
1. https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-v...
2. https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/technologies/z_backscatte...
I feel so much better! /sarcasm
How tone deaf can they be?
Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
Racism is certainly the biggest concern of the media, which may or may not reflect the publics general concern.
During the interview he explained how many people in the government essentially wanted to please their own, which includes their own class of people (city people essentially) and the media. He said that ministers were much more worried about how media was covering them, than anything else.
The same people essentially see see the normal general public and people like myself as criminal. They see us a criminal because by in large much of the general public and people like myself don't agree with them.
This sort of statement is very "on brand" if what he said is true.
So it is a thing people which in general are okay with mass surveillance might worried about.
And convincing the people you have a chance to convince is much more useful the pointlessly trying to convince the people which anyway won't like what you do no matter what you say.
When the UK do it...
Double standards are wonderful.
I can't exaggerate the collective despair that I witnessed. Young or old, black or white, Labour or Tory, every single person I spoke to without exception had something negative to say about the state of the country. No matter what their politics, no-one was optimistic, and why would they be?
In recent weeks we've seeing unprecedented protests against migrant hotels, but opposition to immigration is just part of the picture. Brits are giving up on normal politics in ways I wouldn't have imagined even two years ago.
Dark times are ahead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I might as well do it first.
For whatever reason, people on HN seem to think double standards are ok as long as the west do it but not when China does it. Maybe because "freedom"?
People act like the UK is lawless and people can just steal bikes from public bike rakes, steel food from stores, or even turn up on UK shores illegally and be given 4* hotels, but presumably this isn't true given how strictly they enforce almost completely irrelevent stuff like a dude on an electrified skateboard.
Why do the beat when you can sit at your desk and watch or wait for the cameras to pick something up?
They seem to have forgotten that a police presence, i.e. a patrol car cruising around or police walking or cycling the streets not only prevents some crime but makes people feel safer by their visibility.
Democracy has completely lost its meaning, and we're ruled by oligarchs and room-temperature IQ career politicians. I'm so glad to have left that silly island after more than a decade there, but sadly where I am now UK is seen as a model to imitate, and likewise in the rest of Europe. Citizens are completely f'd, and they've also been defanged thanks to modern tech and the entertainment business. Apart from the few that take to the streets to protest with little achievement other than a stint in jail, the vast majority are scrolling TikTok and watching US politics drama as if it was reality TV.
I'm waiting for bated breath for Reform to be voted in, and be as utterly useless as the other two parties. What a bloody farce.
Can email my proton proxy in my profile if you want to be discreet. I have a whole life ahead of me and need to know how to prepare.
One tool would be methods to blind said facial recognition vans. Cameras are relatively easily "blinded".
I like the irony of it, and doubt that "real" protesters give much of a fuck what kinds of boundaries the protested try to put around protesting.
These kinds of things are just another data point documenting "the general decline".
Can you imagine Adolf (DE), Benito (IT), and Joseph (RU) with access to the same surveillance tech?
And encoded in all that ruckus is a uncomfortable truth! This is as far as we will go! There is no miracle tech on the horizon, that can be handed out to the masses, bribing all of us with a 60s like surplus to be peaceful. Instead its panopticon or bust!
Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
To haras and punish people disagreeing with the ruling class?
Also if someone is overdosing, they are probably possessing.
People should do it at home or somewhere else, not on the streets. I don't care if someone is consuming inside their home.
This unevidenced claim is probably nonsense in any case, no police officer would simply walk by. They may very well walk by and talk into their radio to summon the right kind of help, or they may be responding to a higher priority call.
Just because your mate Bob claims they saw something, doesn't mean Bob had any real idea what was going on.
It's like the old saw about a window blind for a hospital ward costing £200, when you can buy one for £20 elsewhere. Thing is the one for £20 doesn't come with a specialised coating that eliminates bacterial or viral spread, or with a bloke that installs it according to the relevant safety regulations, or the supervisor who certifies the installation. It certainly doesn't come with a number you can call to fix the blind if there's a problem with it that includes on site service.
You and I have very different experiences with police officers. Police Officers may walk by someone overdosing is hardly a claim that needs any evidence in my experience because it's so widely understood to be true.
"Here" being "Hungary".
In fact, often defeating crime is bad for this purpose. If you want to maintain a propaganda machine of an enemy within, you need crime. You might even, say, give drugs to those communities. Looking at you, CIA.
Next time do HN better :)
time to vote with your feet people.
What's your threshold for when it becomes a problem? Should we wait until it becomes a problem, or should we try to stop this level of facial recognition?
You should also assume this is a proof of concept. It'll get improved and scaled down to run on every police vehicle, and on every camera the police already control.
Then it will be sold to the public as being successful (they are already claiming that in the article itself that it is successful). Then that will be used to justify them in other places.
through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely
in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have.
Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut.
And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked.
And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.
But it is the daily norm pretty much in any country people do want to frequently get into.
Actually if I had to recommend anything it would be to stay very very very far away from any organized crime organizations. Doing business with them rarely ends well (as it always exposes you to them being able to blackmail you).
I guess I should have put that into the original post.
People act like they weren't able to live and work in Europe before the EU - people did it, it was fine, it's not that difficult if you actually want to do it.
They're certainly ahead on locking up the people who dislike Israel - you're correct on that count. Though I think the USA's still the undisputed king of that.
Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
It's very silly on the small scale. It's no less silly on the large scale, you are simply more accustomed to the cultural understanding the colonialism is not something you have any responsibility for.
It's a "my nation recently and currently systematically exploited people. I would like my nation to try to make those people whole" thing. It happens to be the case that many targets of exploitation were non-white, but the concern is the exploitation not the race of the exploited. We systematically exploited plenty of poor white people too, we should make them whole too.
Redlining in my city "ended" officially in 1968, but in practice it was probably another two decades before it really was removed from standard operation. And in my city, plenty of white people were considered undesirable and redlined. I guarantee you there are people directly impacted by this policy who are still alive, this isn't some far away past long since forgotten by time.
As an example, the city should be considering whether reduced interest rate loans, subsidized housing, rent freezes, or other benefits can be passed on to families directly impacted by redlining policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just because it's been 40 years doesn't mean the city should just give up trying to make people whole.
Taking that example back to colonialism, it means probably returning stolen wealth and some portion of capital earned on the back of that stolen wealth.
I'm not talking about that happened thousands of years ago either. I'm talking about the conditions of the working and poor classes when Britain was a colonial superpower, like througout the 19th century. Hell, even post WWII most of Britain working classes were living very modestly, in wretched wretched council houses, and with low means.
For the vast crimes of leopold and subsequently to lesser extent the belgian state in congo the biggest chunk of money got invested in the brazilian rail network to make one family very rich for example. My great grandparents being subsistence farmers didn't see shit and you'd punish not just them but me for it.
Typically the people moving in are from countries which given fair comparison are similarly not owed an opinion given their sins of the father and many a nation is not allowed it's borders likely also yours lest you live in Buthan or so.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funkmesswagen_(Fernmeldewesen)...
Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
We're all human, we're all the same.
They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
Some context with a link, beyond "just click this", would be nice
People say we need to fight back against this but realistically how?
The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?
Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?
Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.
The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.
Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.
The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.
[0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
The article does not claim this:
"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"
These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.
The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.
West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.
No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.
You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.
Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.
See the Scott Inquiry for details.
1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.
On arrest, you're required to provide your name and address, not proof. For the absolute majority of UK adults, it takes exactly 2 minutes to verify that data against public records - passport, driving licence, council tax, voter registration.
Lying in that situation is a separate criminal offence all of its own.
>satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat
Matches with a confidence rating of <0.64 are automatically deleted >0.7 is considered reliable enough to present to a human operator, and before any action is taken a serving police officer must verify the match, and upon arrest verify the match against the human.
>What if your child falls victim to a false identification
The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and absent any personal identification parental identification is the standard everywhere.
>15-year-old Child Q
The good old slippery slope fallacy. Both the officers who strip searched that child were fired for gross misconduct. North of 50,000 children are arrested each year and this happened once.
>Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
Thing is 12 months on, 1035 arrests, over 700 charges, and that hasn't happened because the point of testing the scheme thoroughly was to stop that from happening.
What proof do you have that it doesn't work.
Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!?
UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition in London and Wales for the last few years. Seven new regions are being added. 10 new vans coming in.
Supermarkets are using facial recognition to keep a database of people they deem criminals.
UK tried to make Apple put in a backdoor to its encrypted storage. Apple removed the ability for UK citizens to use that feature.
Online Safety Act forced online services to implement age verification for "adult" content. Many niche forums closed down because they would face large fines and jail time if they didn't comply. Larger businesses offloaded this requirement onto third party companies so now if you want to see "adult" content online you need to share your face or bank details or government ID with a random third party likely from a different country.
None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
This is because most of the public don't care about those rights either, and are entirely happy with surveillance. You've got nothing to hide right? If you don't the government to know what you're looking at its probably because you're a paedo, or maybe a terrorist. Maybe even both.
Its not the government who need to be convinced on this, it's the general public, and currently there's not really anyone out there explaining how you can't have a backdoor that only the government and good guys will be able to use.
Apple made the change to advanced security in advance of the bill being finalised, now the government has gone in another direction.
All the online safety act does is implement online the law as it stands IRL. British folk have been using the same ID verification systems to validate identity for nightclub admission, passport applications, driving licence applications, benefits claims, state pension claims, disclosure and barring checks, tax filings, mortgage deeds, security clearances, job applications, and court filings since 2016.
All the reaction is just pearl clutching - 5 million checks a day are being performed, the law itself is wildly popular with 70% support amongst adults after implementation.
There are three levels of checks - IAL1 (self-asserted, low confidence), IAL2 (remote or physical proof of identity), and IAL3 (rigorous proof with biometric and physical presence requirements).
IPA 2016 affords police access to your domain history, not content history, provided police can obtain a warrant from a senior High Court Judge. The box which stores the data is at ISP level and is easily circumvented with a VPN, or simply not using your ISP's DNS servers.
IPA 2016 doesn't exempt politicians from surveillance. It includes specific provisions for heightened safeguards when intercepting their communications. The Act establishes a "triple-lock" system for warrants targeting members of a relevant legislature, requiring approval from the Secretary of State, a Judicial Commissioner, and the Prime Minister. This heightened scrutiny is in recognition of the sensitivity involved in surveilling politicians, particularly given the surveillance of Northern Irish politicians and others in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (in force 1 October 2007), and Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides powers over encryption keys/passwords etc. Section 49, RIPA can be used to force decryption, Section 51 to supply keys or passwords. These are identical to powers the police have IRL over safes, deposit boxes etcetera, and the penalty for non-compliance is identical.
You cannot use encryption or passwords to evade legal searches with a scope determined by a court on the basis of evidence of probable cause shown to the court by the entity requesting the search. A warrant from the High Court is required for each use.
Notable cases:-
- Blue chip hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally obtaining private information on behalf of blue chip companies.
- Phone hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally hacking voice mail on behalf of newspapers.
- Founder of an ISP using his position to illegally intercept communications and use them for blackmail.
No, they are not.
> Our research indicates that over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act – from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum. We know that new regulation can create uncertainty – particularly for small organisations that may be run on a part time or voluntary basis.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Ah right, just a couple of forms how bad can it possi...
> Step 1: identify the 17 kinds of priority illegal content that need to be separately assessed
lol.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
If you're a site with lots of child users, or if your site holds pornography.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Regarding age verification, the OSA is explicit states that if you ban all such content in your T&Cs you do NOT need to have age verification.
You won't mind getting rid of it, then.
If you happen to be running the UK panty wetters forum from your own server, then you have a problem, but grandma Jessie's knitting circle is explicitly not in scope.
YOUR link goes on to say
>the more onerous requirements will fall upon the largest services with the highest reach and/or those services that are particularly high risk.
Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
However, if you're not an adult site, you only need to comply by providing the lowest level of self certified check. Handily, most of the big forum software providers have already implemented this and offer a free service integration.
Storm meet teacup.
I do love it when people lie and then try to get sassy when called out.
> Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
I also like it when people who accuse others of not reading prove themselves incapable of reading - as pointed out below, what I linked is required regardless of the assumed age of your userbase.
Match quality below 0.64 is automatically discarded >0.7 is considered reliable enough for an enquiry to be made.
So far ~1,035 arrests since last year resulting in 773 charges or cautions, which is pretty good when you consider that a 'trained' police officer's odds of correctly picking a stop and search candidate are 1 in 9.
In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked, appropriate checks are made on arrest, and if you lied you get re-arrested for fraud.
The system has proved adept at monitoring sex offenders breaching their licence conditions - one man was caught with a 6-year-old when he was banned from being anywhere near children.
Before anyone waxes lyrical about the surveillance state and the number of CCTV cameras, me and the guy who stabbed me were caught on 40 cameras, and not a single one could ID either of us.
> "In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked"
Well if you are suspected of a crime they can arrest you if you refuse to identify yourself. I 'suspect' that being flagged by this system counts as such if you match someone who is wanted or similar.
If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of. Yes, facial recognition does count, but it has to be a high confidence match >0.7, verified by a police officer personally, after the match is made, and verified again on arrest.
If you are suspected of Anti-Social Behaviour then you have to ID (Section 50 of the Police Reform Act)
If you are arrested, then you have to provide your name and address (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2000).
If you are driving, you have to ID (Section 164 of the Road Traffic Act).
Providing false information or documents is a separate criminal offence.
Essentially, police can't just rock up, demand ID, and ask questions without a compelling reason.
> If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of
It's always been my impression that this kind of ambiguous phrasing combined with the power imbalance gives the public absolutely no protection whatsoever. Let's say you don't want to provide ID: the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID. Good luck arguing with that
In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.
The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.
Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.
It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.
Security theatre, like TSA shoe policies, inducing the panopticon. Leaked rumors about facial recognition vans serve their purpose, and we post in these comments while literally in front of networked cameras.