Comment by steve_gh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_gh | Hacker News Reader

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It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.

If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.

Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.

The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.

Putting it kindly, this is an incredibly optimistic interpretation of how historically the government and police have used their powers. There is a long and consistent history of UK police abusing powers, stretching legal definitions and using technology to target those outside the original mandate of a law or investigation.

Antiterrorism and anti-disorder laws sold to the public as needed to prevent serious threats have been used extensively outside of what I think most would consider reasonable to surveil people, restrict freedoms and harass. The prime example are the stop and search laws, used to search a large numbers of people, predominantly based on racial stereotype, with zero impact on terrorism.

Remember that the Met police is known to be institutionally racist & sexist. It is not an organisation to be trusted.

The UK stopped being a democracy a long time ago.

In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.

You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.

The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.

> You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.

Again, no, not just "in an investigation".

It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.

Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.

It doesn't make it OK if a judge says you have to incriminate yourself or face jail time for not doing so. So either way you're screwed if it gets to that.

How does that make us not a democracy? You are confusing the constitutionally based US system with the parliamentary based UK system. They work differently. We have elections typically every 4-5 years and elect a new government. That's the democracy bit. The laws that our elected representatives make are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But they are made by the people we elected.

So what you are saying is this is what you want as citizens, to be surveilled and tracked by police 24/7?

I mean, quite a lot of people want that or think they want it in many Western societies. They want the police to be able to find criminals, they want their kids kept off social media, they want terrorists' comms to be intercepted, they want 'immigrants' to not be able to claim benefits, they want voters to be required to produce ID, they want all manner of joined-up information state capabilities and they don't give a shit if they're surveilled and caught up in it until/unless it bites them in the ass.

And the thing is that they're not necessarily wrong to want some of those things, but they don't understand or don't care about collateral damage or what you might perceive as a lack of freedom. So they will happily vote for it.

Democracies vote to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Look around you.

My point is that the technology exists, for good or ill, and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle.

What we can do, and should do as a society, is decide on how that technology should be used. And that means regulating it, in the same way that we regulate other technologies. For example, we regulate cars. Not just who can use them, but how they have to be constructed too. And we also place limits on how the authorities can use them, for example the rules that the police must obey when in an emergency response situation.

We are a democracy, so these rules are made by the people we have elected. so when it comes down to it, yes, this is what we as a people have asked for. And we are responsible for the conditions that the police can use this technology under.

FWIW, the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has. And they are an awful lot less accountable.

> the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has.

This will be a good argument when Google or Meta are able to arrest you.

Google can block access to your Google account, which is enormously disruptive for many people whose online lives are built around it. In some ways it could be more disruptive in the long term than an arrest.

At least I can choose to not do business with Google. I can't do the same with my government. Even emigrating effectively requires their permission.

In principle, yes, but the lock in is real. Most non-technical people who have decades' worth of important data and credentials linked to their Google Accounts can't easily move away from them. Depending on personal circumstances, it's not difficult to imagine some international moves being easier than losing all your Google accounts. I've moved internationally several times, but I can barely contemplate what would happen if I lost my GMail.

> In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination.

By "may harm your defence" what is meant is that Miranda was modified to inform people who are arrested that magistrates and juries are fully allowed to infer that you might be seeking to mislead the court if you didn't tell the police something significant that you later rely on as a defence in court. You're still allowed to do it, and they are allowed to conclude it is sketchy. That's the point of the modification.

Juries do and did this anyway.

The modified Miranda doesn't say you have no right against self-incrimination; it now warns you that if something is crucial to your defence it might be in your interest to mention it so the jury doesn't think you are trying to shine them on.

It's important to understand that this happens in the context of a country that does not have a plea bargaining mechanism. Cases go to court if it is in the public interest that they do (and the police don't decide this). But you can still no-comment your way through an interview and you aren't going to be bullied by a prosecutor into accepting a plea deal.

Miranda is an American case and has no relevance to UK law, the precedents aren't interchangeable.

Of course but that is not really what I am asserting; I was just responding to an American in terms that are understood.

UK suspects on arrest are, nevertheless, read their rights in what is colloquially understood here as a "Miranda warning". It's my understanding that "Miranda rights" are a sort of colloquial shorthand in lots of countries, because we all see US crime procedurals.

(It's actually called "The Caution", and US Miranda rights were inspired by an earlier version, though AFAIR we borrowed back some changes that were influenced by the Miranda wording, before the contentious modification about "may harm your defence")

The subsequent "they modified Miranda" fuss made quite a bit of international news when it was introduced, with Americans sniping at us about changing it, arguing we'd taken away the right not to self-incriminate, etc., that we'd sullied the grand tradition of English Common Law, all that rather ironic snarking from the country that pioneered the abusive plea bargain system.

The Caution read at arrest is actually shorter in the UK; it doesn't mention that the cautioned have a right to an attorney or one will be appointed for them. They do, but the duty sergeant at the police station tells them that when they are booked.

This just isn't true... you've heard of "no comment" right? And the ability for the police to invoke the requirement for you to provide your PIN is behind the tests of specific legislation. You're not automatically required to provide it.

This. It's all within a democratic and legal framework, from GDPR to organisational policies. The source is the police themselves informing the public of the trial. The actual camera setup is bright yellow in the middle of the concourse, it's not hidden. They haven't hidden this technology, a private company hasn't deployed this technology. As citizens you have some control. It's probably not perfect, but there's humans in the loop. You have recourse to complain, to write to your PM, to take a different route (because they are pre-warning you). This IS democracy.

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