Live Facial Recognition is about to put everyone in the UK in a digital police line up without their consent

The UK government has announced plans to extend Live Facial Recognition (LFR) across the country, following a High Court ruling that upheld the Metropolitan Police’s use of the system.

Chillingly, Policing Minister Sarah Jones welcomed the judgment, saying: “Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear.” Worse, she called anyone who opposes the technology “uncivil” and implied they are on the side of murderers and rapists. Apparently, it’s wrong to want privacy.

The High Court insisted there are adequate safeguards in place, but you can’t safeguard against the risks of function creep. The government plans to ramp up the number of surveillance vans in our cities, making LFR available to every police force in England and Wales.

Police officers are dragging people off the street and demanding their details if they refuse to have their face scanned. Only a small number of actual criminals are being caught, with one trial resulting in zero arrests, yet mass surveillance is being sold as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA” for catching violent offenders. Their solution to crime is to make your face become your ID card.

If we truly have nothing to fear, let’s put cameras in our homes, in our bathrooms even. Let’s give police remote access to our webcams. After all, we have nothing to fear, so who needs privacy, right? I mean it’s not like George Orwell warned us about this crap.

Who needs surveillance vans when we can give every police officer a pair of Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy AI glasses that secretly record bikini-clad girls at the beach? Officers could pull information about hot chicks, I mean suspects in real time. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from perverts with augmented-reality tech, right? I’m sure Wayne Couzens would have been a much more effective officer with AI glasses.

Met Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said: "The question is no longer whether we should use live facial recognition, it's why we would choose not to." Well, there are quite a few reasons, actually, and I don’t remember being given a choice…

Youth worker Shaun Thompson was stopped and detained in 2024 after LFR wrongly matched him to his brother, and police initially refused to accept his ID. He described his experience as “stop and search on steroids”. As someone who has been stopped and searched many times, I do not want this to become the norm. It’s harassment.

Thompson brought a judicial review along with Silkie Carlo, director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. The pair warned of arbitrary or discriminatory use, the potential for a chilling effect on protests, and the risk of cameras making everyday movement impossible without biometric scanning.

We are almost at that “impossible” stage. Already, we have to scan our faces or show ID to use many websites. How long until we must scan our faces to enter a public building, board a train, or attend a rally? How long until everyone who rejects this system is cut off from society? How long until there is nowhere to hide and dissent is impossible?

The US is banning people from attending events like the World Cup if they have posted things on social media it disapproves of (such as criticism of Israel). Many countries are doing similar things.

History shows us that whenever a government introduces some kind of monitoring tool, “function creep” comes into effect. I remember during the Blair years when councils were using anti-terror legislation to monitor how people were using their bins. The point is that once a system is in place, authorities will come up with new ways to exploit it—ways we might not have thought of.

Consider how the government is banning repeated protests to prevent “disruption” under the Public Order Act 2023. With LFR technology, they could limit the number of protests you attend. Protest too often and sorry, I’m afraid you’re being disruptive. You’re under arrest.

Consider how Palestine Action protesters are treated as terrorists. It’s easy to foresee a situation where everyone at those protests has their face scanned and placed on a watchlist. Twenty years later that information is shared with an employer running background checks and their career is over because they are linked to “terrorism”.

Consider how police have contracts for pre-crime technology with Palantir, the evil AI company that intends to build a global panopticon, reintroduce a military draft, and use “hard power” backed by AI weapons to dominate the world. It’s all in their recently published “Technological Republic” manifesto, which has been compared to the ramblings of a supervillain and described as a blueprint for unchecked surveillance.

Palantir is behind many of the LFR initiatives in the UK, and MPs from multiple parties are now demanding reviews of the company’s government contracts.

Palantir has access to our NHS records via the Federated Data Platform, works with the Ministry of Defence on live operational analytics, and helps police forecast potential criminal activity. An investigation from Liberty revealed the company merges criminal records with health data, financial info, political beliefs, race, sexual orientation, and even union membership. Still think this isn’t political?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has expressed her own desire for a panopticon to none other than Tony Blair, one of the biggest cheerleaders for digital ID. In an interview, she said her vision was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon: “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.” It’s not hard to see where this is heading.

A government consultation asked whether LFR should be used to monitor “disruptive” protests in advance, meaning police would scan crowds near the protest site, as well as routes to the event, and known meeting points. LFR would check faces against police watchlists for potential disruptors and repeat protesters. Combine this with the new face-covering ban and it would have a clear chilling effect on assembly and expression.

The government consultation quietly admits police could access passport, driving licence, and future digital ID photos for LFR. Now add Palantir AI tools into the mix and you have a recipe for dystopia. It doesn’t matter what safeguards are in place because those safeguards can be removed at any point.

Everywhere you go, your face can be scanned without your knowledge or consent. If AI misidentifies you, you can be whisked away by police while you are quietly going about your daily business. Perhaps you are on your way to work or you’re having a nice family day out: suddenly you are a suspect and you are expected to prove your innocence. You have to demonstrate that you are not who the AI thinks you are, otherwise you are going to court.

Stores up and down the UK are using the FaceWatch live AI recognition system. Shoppers at places like Budgens, Sports Direct, Costcutter, Sainsbury’s, B&M, and Home Bargains are being scanned without their knowledge and sometimes misidentified by AI.

Just yesterday, a story broke of a man who was held in custody for 24 hours and taken to court after being wrongly accused of stealing from IKEA when he was actually hosting an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting 11 miles away! One shopper found themselves on a watchlist over a 39p paracetamol dispute. Some analyses put FaceWatch false positive rates at one in 40. Now the police are using a similar system to FaceWatch. What could possibly go wrong?

Imagine you are forced to have digital ID with a biometric passport photo, linked to a GOV.UK Wallet on your phone. It gets pitched as convenience, but you are forced to use it for public services, banking, purchases, and other daily tasks, leaving a digital footprint wherever you go. If that app has access to your location data, suddenly your every movement is monitored.

The most effective way to stop dissent is to monitor people and cut them off when they step out of line. We are rapidly entering a world where that is possible. If you read the 22-point Palantir manifesto and thought it represents a future we must avoid at all costs, you need to start resisting right fucking now.

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