London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time

https://reclaimthenet.org/london-police-deploy-facial-recognition-at-protest-for-first-time

by Cider9986 • 2 months ago

166 122 2 months ago

stavros3• 2 months ago

Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well.

The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?

hactually• 2 months ago

Must be some heinous crimes to enable dragnet surveillance. That or the rotten state of Britain really is trying anything from splitting at the seams.

Must be the heinous crime thing tho.

philipallstar• 2 months ago

Its definitely not heinous crimes. It's just recording people at events to know who's of what political persuasion.

4ndrewl2• 2 months ago

Or maybe it's just that whenever Tommy ten names has one of his rallies it ends in violence?

baal80spam• 2 months ago

Thought crime, obviously!

rolph• 2 months ago

facial recognition is old news, the development of intent prediction is the edge.

1shooner• 2 months ago

I don't personally support this surveillance, but that isn't what the articles says. It says they will be "scanning for suspects from above." And later quotes the Met making reference to 'intelligence'. So conceivably they could have information about the plans of specific individuals at this event.

stavros3• 2 months ago

Right, but suspects of what? Just in general, all the crimes they know about?

suburban_strike2• 2 months ago

It doesn't matter what the article says. There is no penalty for lying and no incentive to be honest. The media exists to broadcast their lies at scale.

Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.

They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.

By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.

conradludgate• 2 months ago

It's worth stating that historically these right-wing culture protests have been a bit more violent in nature than most protests are. I'm not suggesting that everyone in the protest is violent, but there's enough mob mentality that makes me (someone who lives in London) uncomfortable.

stavros3• 2 months ago

Sure, but there's a difference between surveillance after a crime vs before.

NooneAtAll3• 2 months ago

if protest expects confrontation (for either side reasons), it's possible for roads to be preemptively de-surfaced to get stones to throw at police

graemep8• 2 months ago

No, nothing to do with Reform. Organised by Tommy Robinson. The guy Reform think is such a nutcase that they turned down a huge donation from Elon Musk because Elon made it conditional on letting Robinson join Reform.

Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm2• 2 months ago

To Reforms credit while I do think they started off as a bit of a looney party that relied on theatrics they managed to evolve into a more mature party ever since Zia Yusuf joined and you see how the tone of Nigel Farage has already become more serious. To some that will look like they became "Conservatives 2.0" but I don't think we have another real conservative party left anyway.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

Would there be any point where a horrible person and 150k of his supporters marching would become a crime?

pjc50• 2 months ago

Reform (Farage) got a different £5m under the table donation.

Robinson is gutter racism. Farage is trying to be its respectable face.

KaiserPro8• 2 months ago

this is a Reform UK event

No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.

I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.

However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.

skippyboxedhero5• 2 months ago

There has been no violence at any of the previous marches iirc. I think people assume there must have been because Starmer and co are foaming for violence...but there weren't.

Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers.

Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.

One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.

onetokeoverthe• 2 months ago

first time they admitted it.

phyzix5761• 2 months ago

The UK is one of the most effective and longest running surveillance states so this should not be a surprise to anyone.

Joker_vD2• 2 months ago

Well, Orwell wrote about what he knew.

xeonmc2• 2 months ago

And Alan Moore

Leonard_of_Q• 2 months ago

Whether they're 'effective' is unclear but that this has been a long-growing trend is clear and with that I wonder why this post was downvoted.

skippyboxedhero5• 2 months ago

Yes, the fact that large number of criminal activities have effectively been decriminalized would tend to beg the question why this is being deployed at a political protest.

The implication of police state is that they care about crime, but they do not care about crime. Anyone can turn up in Britain, claim asylum and will be sent to a hotel closed down for their comfort. Many visas were denied for speakers at this protest.

It is a politician state, not a police state. Facial recognition is being deployed against political opponents, not criminals.

KaiserPro8• 2 months ago

most effective

I mean its not. Plus with the court backlogs rising, the chances of you getting convicted are rapidly diminishing

Joker_vD2• 2 months ago

the court backlogs rising

Well, I guess they'll have to raise the custody time limits to something more reasonable then, like a year or so. I mean, as long as you get a trial eventually, this is fine, right?

fidotron2• 2 months ago

I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.

What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?

dgellow• 2 months ago

I’m sure we can find a better anecdote than a bike being stolen…

unethical_ban• 2 months ago

Omniscient government surveillance in practice will be of far more use for harassment and suppressing political dissent than it ever will be used for the public good.

bluefirebrand• 2 months ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Even if the people who are putting all of this surveillance in place genuinely do want to do good, the surveillance will still be in place if someone less scrupulous gains power

krisbolton• 2 months ago

Did that risk materialise? I suppose it would be only the same as credit cards. With a valid warrant authorities can gain access to information. But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament. I'm more concerned about ensuring the legal powers are checked and balanced, and stay that way.

like_any_other• 2 months ago

Warrants aren't all you think they are (this is for the USA, but the UK is not exactly a beacon of liberty in comparison, so I doubt it's much better): https://web.archive.org/web/20140718122350/https://www.popeh...

But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament.

Ah well if it's an elected government then the risk of it turning hostile to its people is zero, of course!

And ask "did that risk materialize?" to the people in China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Belarus, or Germany [1], or USA [2]. There are countless examples of the dangers of surveillance, in the present and in history - you don't need a specific example of exactly Oyster cards being used, to know they are a danger.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/german...

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-administration-argues-it-ca...

jolmg2• 2 months ago

I suppose it would be only the same as credit cards.

The cards seem to accept cash

Gigachad2• 2 months ago

There isn’t the resources to watch all of this cctv. Sure someone could spend weeks watching all the feeds in the city to track the thief down. But the cost quickly exceeds the value of the bike.

Something that’s changing with computer video and AI powered video search tools. I’m very in two minds about it. Being able to solve bike thefts would be great, but a lot of evil could come from a system that actually can monitor and sort through all this video.

andrepd• 2 months ago

What do you mean? Pulling a few camera feeds to track down or identify a theft occurring at a known location at a roughly known time is a few minute's work. It's worth the value of the bike let alone the value of prosecuting a criminal.

fidotron2• 2 months ago

There isn’t the resources to watch all of this cctv. Sure someone could spend weeks watching all the feeds in the city to track the thief down. But the cost quickly exceeds the value of the bike.

Precisely. So why exactly did they deploy so much of it when they had no way of using it? This isn't new, it's been the case since like 2005 that people walking around London generate more CCTV footage time than real time.

There was another farce when they had that second round of attempted bombings on the Underground and despite having very clear video of it happening they absolutely struggled to deal with it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_attempted_... "described by the Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair as "the greatest operational challenge ever faced" by the Met"), leading to the whole shooting of the Brazilian at Stockwell incident.

All this surveillance demonstrably isn't a deterrent to actual criminals or would be terrorists in the slightest.

monksy• 2 months ago

David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it.

Are we talking about flock cameras and the disapparence of Nancy Guthrie?

CTDOCodebases• 2 months ago

This news from the UK is concerning and the UK is slowly turning into a dystopia but still your reasoning is flawed.

The cameras are there to discourage crime and for use in court as evidence. Solving a crime still requires time and energy. Policing is a resources game.

So of course petty crimes are still going to be committed because it’s resource intensive to have someone monitor all the cameras. That is until it isn’t and you have a backlog of video footage of crimes and AI powerful enough to detect crimes being committed in real time. Even then though police work is still required if AI isn't using face or gait detection and/or these systems aren’t hooked up to a database that has linked identifiers to real people. But even those can be defeated with a bally and a limp.

greenavocado• 2 months ago

slowly turning into a dystopia

*has already turned into a dystopian hell hole FTFY

At least China has more good weather

warumdarum• 2 months ago

Middle eastern countries forbid there citizens from studying in the uk out of fear of radicalisation. The uk is really adrift especially as the elites ignore the anti immigration wishes of the population that already led to the first brexit.

hgs6• 2 months ago

Illusion of Control. Oct 7th, 9/11, Snowden, Epstein are all examples of illusion being broken. The reactions are to restore illusion. But its getting harder and harder as things changes faster than reactions can happen. So we get Moises Naims prediction on the End of Power - power is easier to get, harder to use, easy to loose.

gerdesj• 2 months ago

Bugger Oyster and bugger CCTV! How well protected do you think all those video doorbells are?

Your comment is right minded but miss-guided.

You are right to insist on privacy but you failed to note that your neighbours are not twitching their curtains beyond noting your cat is crapping on their veg. To be fair, they probably are but those door cams are probably available in forn parts, way beyond Gladys at no 9's wildest dreams.

I'm old enough to remember Badgers flying across the UK! Those are fucking huge Russian four engined plodders, wheezing across at high altitude in an attempt to cow us into ... some sort of submission. Invariably a flight of Phantoms or Starfighters would whizz on up. In the good old days we'd strap a decent chap onto a firework called a Lightning. I did see a pair do that job - spectacular and I'm sure the pilots probably ended up swallowing their teeth.

Russia does steam punk in some bloody odd ways.

Anyway, I would avoid worrying about our state watching you and worry about other states instead.

drekipus• 2 months ago

To control the "non elite"

crimsoneer2• 2 months ago

It's worth recognising that unlike oyster cards, LFR in it's currently form doesn't store any data. It looks at faces, compares them to currently wanted offenders, and if it matches, alerts the officers operating that camera "live". Nothing is stored or processed beyond that

jaybrendansmith• 2 months ago

It's like they watched 'The Running Man' and said 'How cool would that be...?'

krona4• 2 months ago

Perhaps it will be the first protest where FR is used, but the first pilot (which ended in March) just put 2 FR cameras on a street in Croydon and they arrested "170 wanted criminals" in 6 months.

https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...

croisillon2• 2 months ago

wondering about that line:

  A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.

so she was 16 when she "disappeared" (how, where, sleeping in the streets?) and the camera can link a 16 y.o. face to a 36 y.o. one after probably rough years?

nomel2• 2 months ago

What's the argument here? Thats crimes should be forgiven after 16 years, or that facial recognition is demonstrably robust?

suburban_strike2• 2 months ago

This is a bit of an oversell on their part. The offenses include:

A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.
A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
37 arrests for breaches of court‑imposed conditions
Darame was found to be in breach of tag conditions, in relation to an intentional strangulation and two counts of assault on an emergency worker on Monday, 8 September 2025 and arrested.
Kastriot Krrashi, 35, of Dingwall Road, Croydon, was stopped by officers for being wanted on suspicion of breaching his conditions as a registered sex offender.
Neville Cohen, 55 (25.05.1970) of no fixed address, was stopped by officers for being wanted for failing to comply with a condition on a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) which required him to attend Croydon Police Station in October 2025.

These are all pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of these are misdemeanors. None rise to the level of murder. None are "persons of interest." This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans. Great job, UK-- fish are quite easy to catch once you've tagged them.

The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement. He went on to commit the deadliest terrorist attack in British history: 22 dead, 1000+ injured. The cameras would not have done anything everyone in a position to intervene refused to do. He wasn't a wanted criminal until after he was vaporized by his own bomb.

It doesn't matter what your politics are, if you let the state become this efficient at catching people for offenses are minor as "failure to appear," god help you if you ever turn whistleblower. They'll spend every resource tracking you down, but that stranger you were talking to before your "suicide" will never be found. No public or private agency should have this much power.

krona4• 2 months ago

I'm not sure what your argument is since the police enforce the law as it is, not as it should be. "Without fear or favour."

The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement.

The bureaucratic solution to situations like the Arena bombing is to remove human judgment and replace it with 4k video analytics. The technology already exists. I don't like it either but if there is ever a way to remove decision making power from a person by means of technology or process, the bureaucracy will gleefully use it.

oliwarner• 2 months ago

Most of these are misdemeanors.

That's a very poor read. Most of these look like breaches of previous conviction release terms. Failure to appear isn't a non-issue. It's a bail skip to dodge a conviction.

I'll agree they're not fresh murders, but if you don't enforce the terms of a release on licence, it makes it a joke, and more importantly puts the public at risk.

basisword• 2 months ago

A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.
A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
> These are all pretty low-hanging fruit.
> This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans.

You listed voyeurism and RAPE. I'll take one less rapist on the streets thank you very much.

cjs_ac• 2 months ago

Live facial recognition will scan the faces of those heading to the “Unite the Kingdom, Unite the West” rally in the borough of Camden, marking the first time the technology has been authorized for use at a protest in the UK. The rally was organized by activist Tommy Robinson who says the rally is for “national unity, free speech and Christian values.”

Let's have a look at Tommy Robinson's Wikipedia article*:

Robinson has a history of criminal convictions,[5] including for crimes such as assault,[6] threats,[7] harassment,[8] and fraud,[5] as well as contempt of court rulings relating to his videos, and has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025. In June 2022, Robinson said that he lost £100,000 in gambling before declaring bankruptcy in March 2021. He also said he owed an estimated £160,000 to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In August 2024, The Times said that he owed in the region of £2 million to his creditors, and was the subject of a HMRC investigation over unpaid taxes.

The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot, and have planned accordingly. British police forces have a long-established procedure for collecting CCTV evidence during riots, and then using that to prosecute rioters afterwards.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson

pessimizer2• 2 months ago

Yes. It's alright to do it when I don't like the person. Should a person I don't like really have rights, or privacy? Also, I'm sure that the people who don't like him like me, right?

JumpCrisscross2• 2 months ago

Should a person I don't like really have rights, or privacy?

For a society striking a British balance between security and privacy, I'd say it's fair to require people with violent convictions to (a) register public protests they plan to attend and (b) consent to facial-recognition surveillance in public. (One could hash, locally store and potentially hardware enforce the restriction on the device level.)

That doesn't mean I think it's okay for everyone around him to have to give up those rights. And I wouldn't support even that in America unless the individual is on probation.

elzbardico• 2 months ago

This is absolutely irrelevant. I don't fucking care whatever the police thinks a protest, any protest should turn into, because I don't want the police to have this power, because it will be abused.

aliasxneo• 2 months ago

Unfortunately the outcome of massive division. People are gullible enough to go along with it while it's not being used against "their people" until it ends up being too late.

krona4• 2 months ago

The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot

Robinson has organised 4 London rallies in recent years and this is the second Unite The Kingdom rally. So what makes you think this will be the one which turns violent?

It's basically families listening to speakers on a stage.

bcraven• 2 months ago

"Dozens of officers injured as up to 150,000 join Tommy Robinson rally"

Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said officers had "policed without fear or favour", knowing it would be challenging.

"There is no doubt that many came to exercise their lawful right to protest, but there were many who came intent on violence."

Assistant Commissioner Twist said officers had suffered broken teeth, concussion, a prolapsed disc, a head injury and a possible broken nose.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwydezxl0xlo

deletedie2• 2 months ago

Each and every one of those rallies has been uniquely, relative to other rallies, violent

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/13/unite-the-ki...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/23/police-clash...

selfhoster13122• 2 months ago

As the old saying goes, a good nazi is a dead nazi. However, does that justify amplifying police and surveillance powers? Do you truly believe CCTV and armed cops will be used to protect the population, despite most of the State apparatus being fascistoid?

Caracas2883• 2 months ago

Regarding the broader picture, it’s interesting that despite the ineffectiveness of even major protests over the past decades—Iraq being the prime example—governments are introducing more obstacles to disincentivise them. From the perspective of government, why not simply ignore such events, use existing (extensive) laws which cover them? It’s like states are unconsciously preparing for the large-scale disruption which may yet come to pass.

pbhjpbhj5• 2 months ago

You think police should ignore situations in which violence and destruction of property are highly likely?

Why? How does that benefit society?

At what point do you allow intervention? After they've destroyed £x,000 of property? After people are assaulted? How are you proposing police get deployed safely in those circumstances with 10s of thousands of protesters/rioters in the streets?

Don't you think maintaining law& order is a necessary activity of the state in a democracy?

You can't seriously think we should stand back and give over or streets to whoever can be most violent?

Caracas2883• 2 months ago

No, I didn’t say police should ignore violence, I actually said that existing laws would be sufficient. I was referring to governments ‘ignoring’, i.e. not further restricting rights to protest, not the police ignoring protests.

To address it though, I think we are in a bad situation when widespread violence is even a risk; it indicates that civic pride has completely broken down.

I don’t know what the answer would be in that situation, and I’m not proposing a solution to it. (I’m not sure we’re there quite yet either)

More important than people trusting authority is authority trusting the people. The more trust in a society, the less ‘law and order’ needs to be handled by structures external to the social mass.

nuyarusskii• 2 months ago

"Why not ignore such events?"

Because then (when mass protests are simply ignored) the "Russian disinformation" about UK not being precisely a "democracy" suddenly starts looking true?

If you have no protests, it means that the public is ok with what the government is doing. In a democracy (whatever one understands by it) that is.

Caracas2883• 2 months ago

I’m assuming here the government isn’t inherently altruistic, and that citizens have to fight for their rights rather than simply be handed them.

My question is, what is the reason that more restrictions on protest are being brought in now specifically (ever since the Extinction Rebellion protests); is there a deeper motive. If there is, I don’t know what it would be.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

A loud minority can look like a majority. (I'm not sure if there's a way to solve this)

sureglymop• 2 months ago

It's crazy how little hardware is required to do facial recognition, OCR and CLIP. Immich on my little raspberry pi swiftly chewed through 100k pictures over night.

yamillove• 2 months ago

Tons of terrorists are wondering what to do now.

lorecore• 2 months ago

I'm staunchly pro-Palestinian, despise Tommy Robinson and still think this is not a good thing. The UK has been draconian with its anti-free speech and surveillance. Even if you hate what this guy stands for (I do), it's only a matter of time before these techniques are used against causes you do stand for.

Somehow I don't think Tommy Robinson would take such an approach to say the classification of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization by the UK government though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Action#Proscription_...

nailer• 2 months ago

They hit a police officer in the spine with a sledgehammer. That seems like inspiring terror through attacking unrelated innocent victims.

xeonmc2• 2 months ago

    Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
    Gunpowder, treason and plot.
    I see no reason
    Why gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot.

mancerayder• 2 months ago

I've just finished watching 'The Capture' which is a UK spy show about AI facial recognition and deep fakes, which takes all of this one step further. While it's fictional, they're show these central command type rooms with big screens that let a group of people on PCs manage automated tracking of people based on criteria they pop in, and various probability statistics of recognizing people. I've always wondered how it looks, all these thousands of camera feeds, when the authorities are searching and monitoring all those feeds.

London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time

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