Gullible public accepted use of Hikvision
London Metropolitan’s police used a live facial recognition system on the public watching the coronation of the UK’s new king, minutes after telling the media that the use of oppressive Chinese-made labour-camp cameras from Hikvision, were being considered. If true, the Met Police’s systems integrators set multiple records for installation and integration and they could be in massive demand in future.
UK civil liberties group Big Brother Watch said on Twitter the police were testing public opinion by making the announcement about a possible installation of the surveillance technology. “The Government’s decision to install 38 Hikvision cameras along the Coronation route shows a staggering lack of judgment, especially given that Hikvision is already banned from many Government sites. It is grossly inappropriate, deeply insensitive, and a stain on our country’s record that Chinese state-owned companies closely linked to grave human rights abuses will have their surveillance tech at the heart of this historic event,” Big Brother Watch said in a statement.
If that was the case, the testing phase was over quickly, reported Didi Rankovic in ReclaimTheNet, since the London police website detailed all the actions they would be undertaking during the coronation, on Wednesday. Among those details was the admission that facial recognition would be used in central London. The plan to use the technology was explained using the watch list that will focus on persons whose presence would raise public protection concerns.
This class of citizen includes those with outstanding warrants against them, or those undergoing relevant offender management programmes. Before it became official that live facial recognition will indeed play a role during the event, Big Brother posted a response on its site to the Metropolitan police, which was at that point considering this.
The group’s Legal and Policy Officer Madeleine Stone said that this type of surveillance is an authoritarian and Orwellian tool, that would in the end treat everyone as suspects whose biometric data is checked by the police. Hundreds of thousands of people attending the coronation were likely to be considered as suspects.
The system is not actually useful in detecting threats, which is its main raison d’etre, according to ReclaimTheNet. Big Brother Watch claims that the London police themselves have put out numbers that show 86% percent of racial flags are not accurate.
“Live facial recognition is not referenced in a single UK law, has never been debated in parliament, and is one of the most privacy-intrusive technologies ever used in British policing,” said Stone.
Other measures that observers saw were GPS jammers that are already installed in Westminster, but are not currently active.