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.
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
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.
Not really. The UK government does not operate a centrally-controlled CCTV surveillance system, contrary to popular myth. There are a lot of privately owned cameras (but no reliable estimates of how many), and some local authorities, police forces, etc. operate CCTV cameras in certain locations.
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.
The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
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.
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
The first time I taught, it was a rather interesting experience realizing how little capacity teachers actually have to deal with e.g. a disruptive student. Yeah you can pass them along to the disciplinarian or whatever, but in the end it's often empty threats - especially if the parents themselves don't particularly care, which in the case of highly disruptive students is nearly always the case. But if a class itself, or even a significant minority of a class, simply chose to stop cooperating - there's not much of anything anyone could do about it.
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.
It's worth recognising this is a very, very limited application of facial recognition, and miles away from what China deploys (or what's regularly used in the US)
Racism/ Sinophobia makes people think that there’s a Chinese surveillance and a western surveillance when in fact there is just surveillance.
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.
No it hasn’t become so dangerous and surveillance doesn’t help. Neither cameras nor real-name accounts actually helped to prevent crimes. Same with databases, lists or other surveillance tools. Many criminals who committed terrorism were known to the police before and they chose not to act or processes were not in place. All it does is lead to less freedom and security. The government itself is the security threat. There are always black sheep working there. They sell private details, enforce their own agenda or fail to secure sensitive information. Also extreme political parties can and did/will use it to silence undesired persons. Ask anyone who knows a bit of German history for many good examples.
If you oppose it then the right will say you support criminals and illegal immigrants and the left will say you harbor racist desires to express hatred under the guise of free speech and privacy.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
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.
>Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
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).
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]
Actually, there is no limit on facial recognition in China, government uses it, universities use it, even middle schools use it. yes there is a consent form for u to sign and you can refuse to sign it, but then lots of trouble come: e.g. you need facial recognition to enter school, so now since you didnt sign the consent form, you need to spend half an hour or more arguing with the security guard.
And when it comes to online behavior: 1. governments do monitor citizen's words online, like in QQ groups (something like slack / discord). 2. In most circumstances, complaining too much or even curse the country will not be punished, only those who take action in reality will be sent to prison, e.g. organizing demonstrations. 3. But discussing about things like how to build a bomb will lead to a conversation between you and the police.
I know these because I have experienced all these kinds of things in China. However, most (at least 80% of my acquaintance) do NOT care about this and support these policies. (To be honest, I personally also do not care about this kind of policy —— as long as the government does not raise taxes, I and most chinese do not care where the tax goes.)
Usually it is more about the weakness and incapacity of the authorities that are unable to carry out their job well, or several times they are lazy to perform difficult and tedious tasks, so they put limits on everyone instead, making everyone suspect, just to catch those very very few cases, that they are increasingly unable to.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
Where is this quote from? I couldn't see it in the article.
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?
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.
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.
Well there had been system with very high rates of false positives for certain ethnicities which if wide scale deployed would in effect be like systematic harassment of this people.
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.
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
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 may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.
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).
The point of the police state is not to prevent crime, but to silence dissent and foster cooperation with whatever government propaganda and initiatives are popular at the time.
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.
116 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 83.7 ms ] threadWe are going to be hearing that argument a lot as the AI police state evolves
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").
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.
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.
As shocking as this is, it's not _surprising_
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
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).
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 :)
https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
Some context with a link, beyond "just click this", would be nice