Declaring “far-right hatred” the immediate challenge for the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a rollout of facial recognition technology on Thursday night, sparking warnings by civil liberty advocates Big Brother Watch about the encroaching surveillance state.
The UK has seen a series of protests and riots in several towns across England this week, with authorities bracing for what they suspect could be more on Friday night. These indicents of violence follow the mass stabbing of children at a summer holiday activity club on Monday.
17-year-old Rwandan-heritage Alex Rudakubana was arrested and subsequently charged with murder and attempted murder, and having appeared before a judge on Thursday will now not be seen again until October with his next court date.
Speaking on Thursday night in a speech addressing the riots in the country — if not so much the deadly attack that sparked them — Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer listed his responses to the unrest, including a crackdown with a new cross-border police command. Of the tools to be rolled out to stifle dissent, Sir Keir named: “wider deployment of facial recognition technology, and preventative action: criminal behaviour orders to restrict their movement, before they can even board a train”.
While many might have suspected the riots this week might have had something to do with protesting the mass-stabbing of children in Merseyside on Monday and its subsequent handling by the authorities, the Prime Minister dismissed the possibility there could be any legitimate concerns being articulated. He said: “Let’s be very clear about this, it’s not protest. It’s not legitimate. It’s crime, violent disorder… this is not a protest that has got out of hand, this is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”
Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch which campaigns against intrusive government surveillance encroaching on the lives of Britons and to reclaim already lost privacy, was fast to recognise the implied threat of the comments, and called the Prime Minister’s words an “alarming pledge” that threatens rather than protects democracy”.
She said she was “angry” about the direction Starmer had decided to take, stating: “This AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no explicit legal basis in the UK. Whilst common in Russia and China, live facial recognition is banned in Europe.”
Mandatory ID cards as cited by Carlo are a long-standing obsession of the Labour Party, now again in power in the United Kingdom after this month’s election. The country almost had them imposed during the last left-wing government, until they were repealed at the last minute by the new Conservative-Liberal coalition government in 2010.
The Prime Minister was looking to address the symptoms of the problem, she said, rather than the root causes. Carlo continued: “It’s deeply worrying that the Prime Minister totally failed to address the causes of the violent, racist thuggery we have witnessed in Britain this week, let alone his failure to even address the causes of the heinous knife crime that has cruelly taken so many lives.
“To promise the country ineffective AI surveillance in these circumstances was frankly tone deaf and will give the public absolutely no confidence that this government has the competence or conviction to get tough on the causes of these crimes and protect the public.”
A serious problem that has massive implications for civil liberties with facial recognition camera systems is they produce a lot of false-positives, Carlo said. Citing Big Brother Watch’s ongoing campaign against the technology, she noted her co-campaigner is — ironically — an anti-knife campaigner who had been falsely flagged as a criminal by a Metropolitan Police camera.
The group said of Shaun at the time of launching the campaign: “This is a dangerous reversal of the presumption of innocence – the foundation of our democracy and freedom. They include Shaun, a community worker who was stopped on the street, interrogated for almost half an hour and threatened with arrest following a facial recognition misidentification by the Metropolitan Police.
“He was walking home from a patrol with Street Fathers, a community group that provides a positive male presence for young people and takes knives off the streets. As Shaun said, “instead of working to get knives off the streets like I do, they were wasting their time with technology when they knew it had made a mistake”.”