It gets tedious after enough time to keep going on about 1984 or encroaching surveillance states, etc.
Cliched even.
Days after live facial recognition technology was established in Croydon, where it is being trialed, news stories were already cropping up to suggest how successful the system has already proven to be.
How much of that is legitimate and how much is carefully staged PR, I have no idea.
London is already famously the most CCTV heavy city in the world. This prevalence of surveillance cameras doesn’t appear to have done much, historically, to stop crime.
But I suppose it’s less about crime prevention and more about identifying and apprehending offenders after the fact.
Which is fine. And obviously we should want authorities to be able to arrest criminals effectively. In theory then, any tech that enables that to happen more efficiently should be welcomed.
So why do we hesitate instinctively at ideas like facial recognition software?
Well, partly because it’s typically been a feature of Dystopian sci-fi movies for a while.
But more importantly, it’s viewing the latest piece of the Panopticon in conjunction with various other elements that have been slotted into place over the years.
For example, I wrote this article about the creeping police state in the UK eight years ago. And argued that various pieces of a police state system were potentially being moved into place a bit at a time.
It’s the frog and the boiling water analogy: you heat the water up slowly so that the frog doesn’t panic and leap out of the pot.
If we were concerned enough about surveillance eight years ago, then there’s substantially more reason to be worried now.
A lot has happened in the intervening years.
For one thing, we went through the pandemic and the lockdowns: which offered plenty of warning signs about how the state could abruptly impose restrictions on civil liberties, change the rules of society, enforce mass house arrest, and even get citizens to snoop on and snitch on each other.
Whatever else the lockdowns might’ve been in principle, they were in practice a testing ground for Orwellian police state practises – and an opportunity to gage public obedience, fear and overall psychology.
Does anyone remember the drones that were trialed at that time in some UK cities? There were in some cases literally drones in the air, with voices emanating from them, telling people to obey the rules.
Most people have forgotten about that (and I can’t find video footage anymore): but it was like something from Judge Dredd.
As an aside, it’s often stood out to me that Judge Dredd was a British comic book by UK authors and publishers. Likewise that V For Vendetta, both the graphic novel and the movie, was set in Britain (which I examined here).
Clearly they were using the pandemic to test out this new level of tech/surveillance.
How long before those drones are rolled out permanently: and connected with the other technologies?
A Queen’s Policy Engagement article from 2020 actually raised this issue: ‘police in England have used drone footage to spot people who visited a national park during the lockdown… in theory it could be linked to CCTV networks that are equipped with facial recognition technology and used to identify individuals. This is a particular worry, because facial images that are recorded for health reasons could be re-purposed by law enforcement agencies…’
And what kind of state are we going to be in in the next lockdown, if there is one?
Is this facial recognition tech merely another stage in a broader surveillance apparatus? David Icke once called it the ‘totalitarian tip-toe’.
We also live in an era where democratic norms are eroding and increasingly dictatorial leaders and governments are emerging. These are unstable times. Putting more and more mass surveillance powers into the hands of potentially bad governments or parties is virtually asking for future abuses of power.
If even worse governments gain power in the future, they inherit all of these devices of control and potential tyranny.
It is also worth noting that this tech being installed in part of London comes on the heels of Israel experimenting with similar facial recognition tech in the Occupied Territories, especially the West Bank.
Not for the first time, we could possibly infer that systems or methods first developed or trialed by Israel for oppression of Palestinians ends up being adopted abroad by allied governments for use on domestic populations.
Not dissimilar perhaps to the revelations some years ago about how IDF soldiers were using their experience of brutalising Palestinians to train some American police departments on how to police crime in their cities. I covered these stories years ago here, including the business of British Metropolitan Police being in Israel for training.
Amnesty International labelled this Israeli facial recognition programme in 2024 as ‘automated apartheid’.
It’s a worrying connection. It might not relate to the London trial at all: but the timing’s interesting.
Of course the country with the most widespread and integrated facial recognition systems is China. And China similarly could be seen as developing or experimenting with systems and models later to be adopted by other countries.
The Chinese social credit system – which is somewhat paired to the facial recognition tech – is something that keeps threatening to creep in to our own societies.
Even recent warning signs have been numerous.
Mandatory digital ID is being pushed again. Tony Blair is obsessed with it: he pops up every few years to push it into the news agenda – meaning that they’re obsessed with pushing it through.
Now Blair and co are pushing for this new facial recognition tech to be paired with the mandatory digital ID system.
The spectre of the Chinese-style social credit system looms large. A future where non-compliant citizens are ostracised and frozen out of basic life via digital-based oppression seems more and more possible.
Just in recent months, the UK government has attempted to fast track a bill – the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error & Recovery) Bill – through parliament. As Didi Rankovic noted for Reclaim the Net in February, critics say the draft legislation ‘contains some dystopian social credit-style surveillance provisions’ and the legislation could serve to ‘set up a system of “mass spying” of bank accounts, carried out by the government‘.
In recent months, we’ve already seen all kinds of questionable over-reaches such as people being arrested for Facebook posts, or journalists being detained bizarrely under the Terrorism Act.
We’ve had attempts to change or expand the definition of terrorist and terrorism: something we discussed here. Why the push to criminalise more people by moving the goal-posts?
We’re in an age where peaceful environmental protesters have been handed insanely harsh prison sentences.
An age where mainstream politicians have openly called ceasefire marchers ‘Islamists’ and equated them to terrorists.
The list goes on.
During the pandemic, people who refused the vaccine were being openly demonised on television. This became normalised.
At the height of the lockdowns, I genuinely thought we were going to reach a point where vaccine refusers were reduced to second-class citizens. That didn’t happen – but the pandemic warned us how easily and abruptly such a shift in society could occur.
During the lockdowns, two women were confronted by police for drinking a cup of coffee in a park.
Imagine, say ten years ago, suggesting that a woman could be arrested for drinking coffee in a park: but it happened, and some people didn’t even bat an eyelid at it.
It’s in the context of all of that that we should be concerned about things like facial recognition cameras being brought in – because they are part of a larger system and context.
The abuse of such systems is highly likely too.
To cite one example, just recently the far-right Zionist group ‘Betar US’ boasted about how it was using facial recognition technology to track down pro-Palestinian protesters in the US for arrest and deportation by the authorities.
Which shows how easily this technology can be weaponised.
As another aside, it’s also a curiosity that there are often selective failures of existing security systems like CCTV where useful: for example, the deactivation of surveillance systems on the morning of the 7/7 attacks (systems that were being run by an Israeli firm, no less).
When the CCTV for Westminster was switched off a few years ago, three supposed terrorist attacks occurred within that area – as I noted immediately when the first of those incidents occurred.
The point being these various supposed systems for crime fighting purposes seem to be very selectively utilised at times: and made to fail where so desired.
At any rate, if this sci-fi technology is being trialed in London and is being reported as a success already, it’s a fair bet it’s going to be rolled out more widely sooner or later.
Unless there’s widespread enough opposition, this is eventually going to become a part of everyday life.
Civil liberties groups are not happy, needless to say. Liberty is among those urging caution. In an email I received from them last month, they said: ‘We urgently need safeguards to protect us from the rollout of facial recognition as we go about our daily lives. We’re demanding the Government makes sure: facial recognition is not used without independent sign-off from a judge; no one is added to a police watchlist unless they are reasonable suspected of a serious crime; facial recognition is never used to identify journalists and their sources, whistleblowers, protesters, and anyone in or around polling stations.’
You can add your name to their petition here if you wish to.
It is worth noting that China, where facial recognition tech is so prevalent, has recently been introducing laws to regulate the use of these systems.
So, if even undemocratic China – a country typically not preoccupied with civil liberties – is recognising the privacy issues associated with this technology, it’s a little worrying that we’re apparently pushing ahead with it ourselves.
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