It will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.

Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.

I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.

As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.

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 on people riding electric motorcycles in balaclavas 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.

And yet, crime is doing fine. This tells you what the surveillance state is really for.

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.

You'd be charged under the Computer Misuse act. /i

If I were to guess, they may have some "test" users (people who are involved in this) who are on the watchlist, they do their regular commutes and see if the system picks them up each time.

For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.

I don't think it's very scientific, more of a procurement process.

All due respect but I am not totally against police dealing with protests. I am against this Orwellian surveillance stuff. If you want to police so people can deal with day to day things like go shopping without being harassed or freaked out I am all for that. But do it the old fashioned way.

Because I guess if it's not proven to be effective if they use some known test cases, then they won't roll out to the whole network

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?

> What would be the failure case for the trial?

Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.

Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly.

Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"

The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.

How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view.

Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.

They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.

It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.

If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.

Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.

The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.

> The UK already has so much CCTV.

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.

I'd argue that they actually learned it well, that's why we see anti-privacy stuff like this and Chat Control.

I just went through airport security. It’s been coming a long time. 2001 made a lot of people in the US, at least, normalize big brother.

This time is different, they say.

Worse, the children of the hippies have become reactionary bigots.

i'm pretty sure the majority learned plenty well. But that's not whose in charge is it. Even in democracy, especially in America, it's the billionaires and puritans making these choices.

This is the country that can´t stop dingy boats...this despite journalists always being able to be there on time to take pictures for the Daily Mail...

All that would be left is gait and biometric analysis, as well as any electronic signalling coming from the tracking device everyone carries in their pocket.

This is exactly what happened in Moscow after same tech was launched. It is much 'safer' on streets, since every entrance door and traffic intersection is equipped with cameras now.

But I pick Portugal's approach every time — no public cameras, no dashcams, it is forbidden to record private persons in public without permission.

I love the word "including" there. Yes it will be used for people suspected of minor crimes but it also includes people accused serious crimes as well!

This sentence struck me as well. It says what it is focused on, but nothing about what it actually captures.

What I would like to see is something like this:

- The detectors have a per-determined list of suspect faces and only record information when those faces are spotted.

- These detectors keep only a fixed length of recording that is permanently deleted unless it is actively linked to a crime and explicitly held as part of that investigation.

But it says nothing concrete. Just some nonsense about "focus" which doesn't mean anything.

>> 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.

Could easily be used to track people who posted something bad on Twitter.

Could? Will.

"Could"? Have you seen what they've been doing to protesters?

They're hoping people read this as the nonsense notion that they'll only scan criminal's faces. Reality is that everyone's face will be scanned, processed and stored.

Note to readers: Brazil the Terry Gilliam Kafkaesque movie, not the country.

Unlike Brazil the movie it's quite hard to actually end up in jail in the UK. The courts lean more towards letting criminals walk.

Brazil was also right about the levels of competence within the bureaucracy.

The 1960's was about the time in history when investment went in to surveillance programs.

Computer recognition has been around for a very long time, and has always been on the edge for spying on citizens.

It's accelerated now because we have future technology that they didn't have back then.

The concept of the UK "surveillance state" is actually quite overcooked. It's largely based on myth and dramatisation.

BTP probably have a national live feed of railway station cameras. I bloody hope they do, considering it's a rather small, quite centralised police force that covers an enormous rail network, but they are known to have hired "super-recognisers" — skilled CCTV operators — instead.

We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations. (And the most long-term and persistent of those threats was Irish republican terrorism bankrolled by Americans, for that matter)

But British police generally simply don't have a fully-joined up surveillance system.

We are not tracked from door to door by police cameras; the police control relatively few even in London, and none in most towns. I probably cannot walk through the main part of town without passng a council CCTV camera because two of them are used to keep a pedestrianised road safe, but for the most part I don't think I'd pass one at all.

Councils have cameras for various things — parking and traffic enforcement is a nightmare in small old crowded towns — but police don't always have access to these, even.

(They do where I live because there are actually so few police that we — a town of sixty thousand people — nearly ended up without a police station at all.)

There's a network of traffic cameras on motorways and some urban A roads (traffic is a complex problem in the UK) and one assumes the security services have a feed of that and of the railway station cameras. Again: I want them to.

But we simply do not have and never have had a surveillance system even slightly as capable as the USA has apparently begun rolling out with Flock.

Generally speaking I worry that people outside the UK think the surveillance system in "Hot Fuzz" is real. Most of the time if the British police want to see CCTV footage they have to knock on doors and ask, just like anywhere else.

I assume they were always doing it. Now they're doing it above the table so that they can comb through the dataset for petty reasons that don't justify the expense of parallel construction.

TBH wrapped baseball bat is still a baseball bat, just because it's wrapped it doesn't mean you can't use it plus the beginning of the video was missing and it was clearly during some protest

but I agree being stabbed should be legal for victim /s

Why would they need to do anything so explicit and crude? Everyone carries a smartphone on them at every waking moment and they chose to do it willingly (though unwitting of the implications for personal privacy). They are also ready to use them for surveillance almost on a hair-trigger impulse these days. Thankfully this works against state services almost as much as it works against the public, as channels like Crimebodge are able to show us. But the point is that the state already knows what these devices represent to them in terms of data collection, and are subtle enough to avoid making this a mandatory situation... For now.

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'.

I wonder what makes it different than Japan. Japan, also a large island nation with a developed economy, is also socially conservative in most areas—but the people rely on each other to enforce social norms instead of the law. The government is famously hands off, and tends to release statements and public service campaigns about what citizens should do rather than dictating to them what they must do. And the people generally follow the rules!

> UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next...gambling

The UK is banning gambling? Really?

Direct classification as bad actor with bad intentions.

I can't speak to other nations, but given the present issues in Britain with two tier policing, they will receive a religious exemption. Which may result in everyone wearing a hijab just for privacy.

How traffic cameras are used arguably is a big deal.

> as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal

The amount of recent cases in the US is enough for me to not place any faith in the fact that this system would not be abused.

If you are about to be watched by an abusive person, it may be better to immediately switch the browser to an innocent page rather than possibly closing it down which may look more suspicious.

Or really, in the anarcho-tyrannistic structures Western countries have turned into, those who don't.

OK. There's not much antisemitism in London though. It's a major world city.

I mean lets be honest if you are up to no good and there are facial scanners, you'd just throw on your n95 mask and black hoodie, maybe stick a pebble in your shoe, and then poof this tech no longer stops the bad guys.

There are also cases where law enforcement misuses this sort of technology to stalk romantic interests. So your kids could very well be stalked by a pervert in law enforcement more effectively with this technology.

> Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?

This same argument would apply to Flock cameras, correct?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument.

You assume it will be used in good faith which is charitable. It doesn't even need to take an authoritarian regime to pervert this technology. Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.

honestly, i've found that it's usually better to not engage in these threads. the likelihood of a good faith discussion is very low. as you point out, it's mostly ideological kneejerk reactions rather than actual discussion based on considered viewpoints. but i'll give it a go.

i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.

so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.

there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.

The “main character” syndrome is strong here .. thing is, most people wouldn’t even be the main character in a movie about their own lives .. also if this helps catch criminals/terrorists/thieves .. what’s the actual harm to an innocent passenger ..

ps: great initiative by LU