‘Big Brother’ concerns as South Wales Police to snoop on whole city with ‘semi-permanent’ AI cameras
South Wales Police will use ‘semi-permanent’ AI facial recognition cameras – as opposed to the mobile facial recognition vans used previously – across Cardiff during this year’s Six Nations rugby competition, the first time such ‘city-wide’ coverage has been used and a major step up in the state’s intrusion on the privacy of British people.
As described by Big Brother Watch:
Live facial recognition is an authoritarian mass surveillance tool that turns the public into walking ID cards. By putting these cameras on our high streets, we’re all being treated like suspects in a digital police line-up, with our photos taken for repeated identity checks – often without us even realising it.
According to Big Brother Watch, South Wales Police has used AI facial recognition, paid for from public funds, for the past three years of major sporting events in its area – and has made not a single arrest. The facial recognition cameras will be positioned at busy pedestrian points across the city, giving members of the public no opportunity to avoid the cameras.
Unlike the EU, which now bans police from using live facial recognition except in a few extreme situations and requires a judge’s approval, or for that matter any other democracy – the UK has no laws on its use, allowing police – and control-freak Keir Starmer’s authoritarian government – to act with impunity and without restrictions.
In the hands of such a police-state inclined government, which is already abusing laws and process in an assault on freedoms of assembly and protest, the untrammelled use of such live facial recognition is an extreme danger to civil liberties, due process and democracy – and one that will soon not be limited to one city during rugby matches.
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Bad enough that even the supermarkets have cameras directly in your grid at the self-sevice checkouts- as well as all over the bleedin shop.
Then there was that bloke a couple of years ago – nicked for refusing to remove his facemask so the Met could TRIAL a facial recognition system.
We know this has been coming for a looooong tme, and we’ve skeepwalked into it.
No wonder all the kids these days are rigged out to look identical. Black trackie bottoms, black bubble jackets and face coverings.
Yes, a load of them are those little shits on electric bikes, but if you go past the colleges around the four bridges in birkenhead you’d be forgiven for thinking every single one of the (male) students there were drug-dealing types…if they weren’t wearing viz vests.
To a man, they’re all dressed identically, as descibed above.
Whether those kids feel as though it’s enforced because of the overkill of surveillance, or just a vagary of fashion, I’m not certain, but I’m certain there’s more originality and individuality in communist N.Korea.
And they have LESS cameras trained on their populace than we do.
And after this, keefs still gonna try to force ID cards on us.
Saddest thing is, he’ll most likely succeed…. Or if not him, the gobshite keefs holding
his arse cheeksthe door open for – falange“Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.” You’d Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Is Making a List, and You’re On It
“Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome….”
Starmer is exactly the sort of politician that we don’t need leading a party for the many, not the few’ at this time, because he is “a long-term servant of the security state ” – and he ALWAYS serves its interests.
In days gone by, skwawkbox readers and similar lefties would have called him “a class enemy”.