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Comment by blini-kot | Hacker News Reader

To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first

the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then

in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete

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It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.

To continue GP’s point, in Moscow a “database of outstanding wanted suspects” was enough to get a well-known science writer[1] who publicly expressed her opposition to the war systematically harrassed by the police because she (a then-pregnant woman) matched a database record for, I kid you not, a draft evader. Reportedly some of the officers even admitted the absurdity[2] of the situation but, well, computer says detain.

[1] Asya Kazantseva

[2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.

This is fair, but it feels like it pushes another finger into the door of mass surveillance. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a few toggles away in the station software.

So they say, but how could you even verify it if true?

History is replete with ‘oops, I guess we left that switch on after all!’ type situations, and this is perfect for it.

The thing is, that's the start. But then it will expand. Next it will be tracking and identifying people who went to protests etc.

I don't really want to say never to these kinds of things, when the use is limited. But at the moment there doesn't seem to be any legal limit.

Further, Farage and reform are/were leading in the polls. There's a non zero chance of them getting into power, and the infrastructure is there for them to abuse.

Further, how accurate is this database of outstanding wanted suspects? I ask because I'm currently maybe on bail. Maybe, because there was a gap in between bail sign offs, the wrong person signed that, and I haven't received the latest one, so am I unknowingly supposed to have surrendered myself at the police station, and now risk getting picked up by a camera and getting arrested at the train station?

the definition of "wanted suspects" is the key here, with proper legal loopholes everyone is a suspect, and everyone is wanted

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