Humans learned a lot. They learned some ways that don't work. That's why Germany learned to be more subtle, UK learned it needs more surveillance, France learned to ban face coverings, not Muslims, and USA learned how to properly stack the courts.
“Our deployments are intelligence-led and focused on identifying people wanted by the police or courts, including those suspected of serious offences and those who may be breaching bail conditions or court orders”
This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
Well, no, this is a group of people who police are actively looking to arrest because they believe they've committed a crime. That's a different thing.
I really don't understand why they do trials for this. What would be the failure case for the trial? "We carried out the trial for 6 weeks over X period of time, we arrested Y people, at that rate we've decided this is not compatible with modern liberal democracy, we would've traded a free society for Y+2 arrests over X period but we just didn't quite get there"?
As suggested by other people - this is just going to be used to identify, infiltrate and disrupt the numerous peaceful protests that the police aren't keen on in London.
Is it to ID protestors, or to ID overstayers/other immigrant offenses? Home Office just parked up outside the station waiting for every overstayer to flag instead of just questioning people on walkups?
It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook.
At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.
Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
Brazil was so right. We're just an inference away from being jailed. I'm not from UK but it shows how we are all helpless and see in plain conciousness what is coming. When did we lost the grip?
Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.
It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.
Technology that began in the private sector, retailers using facial recognition technology to profile customers, has now bled over violently into public life. I strongly believe in the right to be forgotten, and I strongly believe in the right to be peacefully invisible. No flock cameras. No facial recognition cameras. The intrusion and dangers are too great against any benefit.
It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
For what it's worth, as a Brit, I assure you no one cares about this, and it's likely that most people, if asked, would support it.
The UK doesn't value liberty for liberty's sake like the US does. In the US there seems to be this notion that freedom is a universal good, where as in the UK people are quite comfortable with liberties being revoked if it means they feel safer or fewer people are doing things they don't like.
UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next – loud fireworks, energy drinks, smoking, gambling, porn, not wearing headphones on public transport, praying for people having abortions, etc.
While this tech will obviously be used to clamp down on protests that are inconvenient to the government (as we've seen happen with protests in recent UK history), even these measures tend to be popular in the UK. Most protest groups are net-unpopular, therefore any movement the government makes to crack down on say Palestine protests, climate protests or immigration protests, are fairly popular here.
Imo the UK was accidentally a liberal country post-WWII to the early 1990s because of influence from the US, but culturally the UK isn't liberal and never was. We're a very socially conservative country and take a natural dislike to anyone who rocks the boat a little.
These new digital surveillance techniques are very much in line with British cultural conservatism, and follow a long history of UK mass surveillance.
As a Brit who inhabits the US desire for freedom I genuinely struggle to relate to Brits and it always makes me feel less insane when I come on here and find other people who value liberty too. But in my real life, I think I've genuinely only ever met one Brit who has shared my desire for freedom.
The US pays lip service to some major freedoms but I think the reality is far from that. US police crack down violently on protests and have for a long time. Their police are far more violent and vindictive in general. Several states have porn bans. Fireworks are restricted heavily in many places. You can buy a house and end up with a random group of locals controlling what you can and can't do with it. You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses.
On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.
Not really related to the written topic of this page, but I noticed there is a sideways red button with "Leave this site" that redirects you to 'https://www.google.co.uk/'. What could be the incentive behind this? Why not just close the tab?
The way things keep devolving in Britain, the easiest path is to force everyone to wear a camera on their chest like the police do. Then you can arrest people who don't wear them because surely they have something to hide.
It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.
I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.
I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.
I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.
Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.
History has taught us that before.
We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.
And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
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
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.
I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.
Frankly this is the least of the problems we have.
There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it 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.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state
I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference.
Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.
On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.
To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Kinda, it's domain-name level, which is again an illustration of the lack of understanding the government has; they were even told this during the public comment phase of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, how their own example of "perhaps a teen goes missing and we can see they went on twitter and look on their account" has the reality of "no you idiots [I'm paraphrasing], their phone is constantly talking to twitter regardless of if they're using it or not, or even still alive or not".
On the other hand, those records are worse than being shared with the state, they can be read at any time by a long list of state entities without anyone even needing a warrant. The Welsh Ambulance service being able to do this without needing warrant is one of the big parts of why I left the UK (the other being Brexit, of course).
>We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.
There's been badly thought out legislation, but drawing the conclusion that
"Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society."
Is wrong.
Historically when it comes to sh*tty regimes there is no such thing as "robust restrictions". At best whatever exists before is a minor inconvenience that can be worked around by ignoring, packing the judiciary, intimidation, or changing the law.
At worst the "robust restrictions" hobble the ability of previous reasonable regimes to operate effectively, thereby increasing their chances of being accused of being soft on crime/immigration and ending up with sh*tty regimes led by so called "strongmen".
Ultimately, no amount of rights or technical restrictions is protection from overreach. The only protection is far harder, and it is to work at developing political systems that bring people together and avoid giving the extremists the opportunity to take power in the first place.
> anonymous travel... died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.
You can buy an Oyster card with cash and top it up with cash from machines at almost every station.
It's still possible to travel somewhat anonymously this way.
You can still use paper tickets if you're worried about your Oyster card being de-anonymised. But as you say, that is not the primary way of travel anymore.
I personally blame all Brits since it's they who allowed their government to pass laws like the Online Safety Act and RIPA Part 2 without so much as a whimper, let alone protest.
In other countries government buildings would've been set on fire.
Makes me wonder, does anyone know of any countries with high living standards that do not have extensive surveillance? I live in Norway, and I assume I’m already being tracked in a lot of ways. Where would I move to, if I came to the point where I felt the downsides of surveillance was beyond the value of staying in the country?
I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.
At first this made me upset - why should I be monitored?
Then it hit me, years ago we had policemen/bobbies that would essentially do the same thing. Look at people - notice them.
It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.
Putting aside the social and legal implications of this trial, I find it very interesting how projects like this are often trumpeted to be successful and celebrated at launch (rather than when proven to work, or save costs or whatever) as though the hard bit was actually wading for months or years through several government and private IT bureaucracies, not making a system that delivers what it promises.
The surveillance of China without the prosperity or safety. At least in China I can leave my bag or laptop out of sight for a moment, same cannot be said of my home city of London. What good is all of this when hard criminals are let out of prison after 6 months. Clown country.
106 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadThis is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
They've already used facial recognition at protests.
Looking forward to seeing the singnage there.
As suggested by other people - this is just going to be used to identify, infiltrate and disrupt the numerous peaceful protests that the police aren't keen on in London.
Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.
At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.
Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.
It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.
It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
The UK doesn't value liberty for liberty's sake like the US does. In the US there seems to be this notion that freedom is a universal good, where as in the UK people are quite comfortable with liberties being revoked if it means they feel safer or fewer people are doing things they don't like.
UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next – loud fireworks, energy drinks, smoking, gambling, porn, not wearing headphones on public transport, praying for people having abortions, etc.
While this tech will obviously be used to clamp down on protests that are inconvenient to the government (as we've seen happen with protests in recent UK history), even these measures tend to be popular in the UK. Most protest groups are net-unpopular, therefore any movement the government makes to crack down on say Palestine protests, climate protests or immigration protests, are fairly popular here.
Imo the UK was accidentally a liberal country post-WWII to the early 1990s because of influence from the US, but culturally the UK isn't liberal and never was. We're a very socially conservative country and take a natural dislike to anyone who rocks the boat a little.
These new digital surveillance techniques are very much in line with British cultural conservatism, and follow a long history of UK mass surveillance.
As a Brit who inhabits the US desire for freedom I genuinely struggle to relate to Brits and it always makes me feel less insane when I come on here and find other people who value liberty too. But in my real life, I think I've genuinely only ever met one Brit who has shared my desire for freedom.
The UK is banning gambling? Really?
On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.
I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.
I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.
I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.
Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.
History has taught us that before.
We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
I just wrote a comment saying something along these same lines (though talking about how the state functions). I absolutely agree with your comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283826
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...
Just want to add, the overhead cameras at checkout are pointed straight down and can read your phone password as you put it in to pull up Apple Pay.
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
Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.
I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.
How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?
Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking.
> Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.
There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways.
When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.
I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference.
Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.
On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.
To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Kinda, it's domain-name level, which is again an illustration of the lack of understanding the government has; they were even told this during the public comment phase of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, how their own example of "perhaps a teen goes missing and we can see they went on twitter and look on their account" has the reality of "no you idiots [I'm paraphrasing], their phone is constantly talking to twitter regardless of if they're using it or not, or even still alive or not".
On the other hand, those records are worse than being shared with the state, they can be read at any time by a long list of state entities without anyone even needing a warrant. The Welsh Ambulance service being able to do this without needing warrant is one of the big parts of why I left the UK (the other being Brexit, of course).
There's been badly thought out legislation, but drawing the conclusion that
"Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society."
Is wrong.
Historically when it comes to sh*tty regimes there is no such thing as "robust restrictions". At best whatever exists before is a minor inconvenience that can be worked around by ignoring, packing the judiciary, intimidation, or changing the law.
At worst the "robust restrictions" hobble the ability of previous reasonable regimes to operate effectively, thereby increasing their chances of being accused of being soft on crime/immigration and ending up with sh*tty regimes led by so called "strongmen".
Ultimately, no amount of rights or technical restrictions is protection from overreach. The only protection is far harder, and it is to work at developing political systems that bring people together and avoid giving the extremists the opportunity to take power in the first place.
(edited to fix italics)
You can buy an Oyster card with cash and top it up with cash from machines at almost every station.
It's still possible to travel somewhat anonymously this way.
You can still use paper tickets if you're worried about your Oyster card being de-anonymised. But as you say, that is not the primary way of travel anymore.
Edit: Points already stated by windowliker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256399
In other countries government buildings would've been set on fire.
It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.
So what is the point ?
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
They also don't arrest for internet memes.
Just saying.