Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared “far-right hate” a pressing challenge for the UK and announced the introduction of facial recognition technology on Thursday night, prompting civil liberties group Big Brother Watch to warn of the encroaching surveillance state.
Britain has seen a series of protests and riots in several towns across England this week, with authorities bracing for more violence on Friday night. These signs of violence follow a mass stabbing of children at a summer holiday activity club on Monday.
Alex Rudakubana, a 17-year-old of Rwandan descent, was arrested and subsequently charged with murder and attempted murder. He appeared before a judge on Thursday but cannot appear again until his next court date in October.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer spoke on Thursday night about the unrest across the country (though he made no mention of the deadly attack that sparked it) and listed plans to respond to the unrest, including a new Border Police Command crackdown. Among the measures Starmer listed to be rolled out to silence dissent: “wider deployment of facial recognition technology, preventative measures: criminal behaviour orders to restrict behaviour before you get on a train.”
I am angry about Starmer’s speech tonight.
His alarming pledge to introduce facial recognition, apparently as a response to the recent unrest, is a pledge to squander even more vital police resources on mass surveillance that threatens rather than protects democracy. pic.twitter.com/hFDqEAYM49
— Silkie Carlo (@silkiecarlo) August 1, 2024
Many may have suspected that this week’s riots were linked to protests over the mass stabbing of children in Merseyside on Monday and the subsequent response from authorities, but the Prime Minister denied any legitimate concerns were being raised. He said: “Let me be clear: this is not a protest. It is not legitimate. This is criminal, this is violent disorder. This is not an unruly protest, this is a group of individuals who are totally committed to violence.”
Silky Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, which campaigns against intrusive government surveillance into British people’s lives and to restore the privacy that has already been lost, was quick to recognise the threat implied in the comments, calling the Prime Minister’s comments a “disturbing pledge” that threatens rather than protects democracy.
She expressed “outrage” at the approach taken by Starmer, saying: “This AI surveillance turns people into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no clear legal basis in the UK. Although common in Russia and China, live facial recognition is banned in Europe.”
The mandatory ID cards mentioned by Carlo are a long-standing pet peeve of the Labour Party, which returned to power in the UK in this month’s general election. The previous left-leaning government in the UK had almost made ID cards mandatory, but the Conservative-Liberal coalition government scrapped it at the last minute in 2010.
After the mass stabbing, the Prime Minister declared that “the challenge before us is driven by far-right hatred”. https://t.co/5JqyzTrcDY pic.twitter.com/vJgdVrzEN6
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 1, 2024
She said the Prime Minister was trying to address the symptoms rather than the root causes of the problem. Ms Carlo continued: “It is deeply disturbing that the Prime Minister has failed to address at all the causes of the violent and racist attacks we have witnessed in the UK this week, let alone the heinous knife crime that has so brutally taken so many lives.”
“In these circumstances, to promise the country that AI surveillance will not work is frankly insensitive and would give the public no confidence that this government has the capacity or the conviction to tackle the causes of these crimes and protect its citizens.”
A significant impact of facial recognition camera systems on civil liberties is the high rate of false positives, Carlo said. Citing an ongoing campaign against the technology by Big Brother Watch, she noted: Joint campaign participants Ironically, he is the anti-knife campaigner who was wrongly recorded as a criminal by Metropolitan police cameras.
At the launch of their campaign, the group said of Sean: “This is a dangerous inversion of the presumption of innocence that is the foundation of our democracy and freedoms. Sean is one such person – a community activist who was stopped in the street, questioned for nearly 30 minutes and threatened with arrest following a facial recognition misidentification by the Metropolitan Police.”
“He was on his way home from a patrol with Street Fathers, a community group that provides positive male presence for young people and takes knives off the streets. As Sean puts it, ‘They were wasting their time with technology, knowing that it was making a mistake, instead of working to get knives off the streets, like I am.'”
“How many more children?” Prime Minister heckles at scene of mass stabbing of young girlshttps://t.co/WLzU1aba8a
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 30, 2024
