back to article Biometrics plan for London Olympic builders

Biometric screening - featuring palm and facial recognition - will be used to guard building sites for the London Olympics. Building workers must pass through a two-tier biometric access system featuring palm and facial recognition to gain access to sites for the 2012 Olympics. At the peak of construction in 2010, the system …

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  1. Robert Grant

    The cameras are necessary

    With them, amateur filmmakers can get every angle on a conversation, to make it more cinematically interesting.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Judgement Day

    'This eyes on the ground plan calls for the Met’s own CCTV camera network to be supplemented by CCTV camera "outside supermarkets, in local businesses, at traffic lights and across the transport network" and passed to a single surveillance centre,"'

    The latest episode of Terminator TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles had them trying to destroy a surveillance system which worked like this, feeding everything into a central database. It was Skynet's eyes.

  3. Glenn Gilbert

    Isn't this getting out of hand?

    "The security budget for the Olympics... has already increased to £1.2bn and may increase further before the games begin, The Times adds."

    That's 1,200,000,000 pounds. We could build another dome for that. Or even fund some MPs expenses. Hell, we could even build a few schools or hospitals.

    Isn't this security paranoia getting out of hand?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    " providing [...] that biometric data would [...] be [...] wiped once it was completed "

    Yeh, right, that's bound to work innit, because it's not like the police would ever forcibly collect and retain the DNA of hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent non-criminals, now, would they?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    500,000 cameras???

    That's almost one camera per Starbucks!

    How many people will they need to monitor half a million cameras? Ahhhh now I see how Nu Labour are going to massage the unemployment figures - everyone on incapacity benefits will become a 'trainee community surveillance operative'.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Biometrics saved my Life!

    I know what you're thinking, that makes no sense, they just want to waste more money on biometrics to try to justify the other huge wastes of money they've already planned on widespread biometric id cards...... but you're WRONG!

    See, me and my boy Timmy were walking in the forest, when suddenly, I slipped, fell in a hole and broke my leg! Timmy was only a toddler and didn't know what to do. He ran off crying into the woods and the next day was found by some passers by. Being too young to explain, these nice people took him to the police.

    After 46 days of detention, the police decided that yeh, after all they didn't really kidnap Timmy and let them go. (They need 46 days to decide if they want to press charges now because, well the internet is so fast and terrorists can hide in it... or something).

    Anyway, fortunately the police had already taken DNA samples of Timmy and the nice people, as is their practice now. Matching the DNA against the sample of random shifty people they'd previously DNA'd, they found I was related to him, they then looked up my GSM cell phone location data and located my dead body.

    Lucky for them biometrics came to the rescue. With my DNA, biometrics and the latest nano technology they'd invested in, they were able to reanimate me. Once reanimated, I could then be arrested for Anti Social Behaviour, leaving my son alone like that!

    You see, none of that would be possible if they hadn't spent all that money on biometrics, nano technology and DNA databases instead of passes and security guards!

  7. Nomen Publicus
    Pirate

    Who watches us?

    Who will be monitoring the images from these 500,000 cameras? Or are they merely there to provide evidence once the terrorists have blown something up.

    Wouldn't an intelligent terrorist ignore the Olympic site and attack a soft target outside London. With the entire worlds TV sets watching images from a vast bomb site, could the Olympics continue?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anybody want to guess the next logical steps?

    With four people per camera, why not just make it a 1:1 ratio? And if it's 1:1, why not just make people WEAR the cameras, thus getting around any issues with tracking multiple people per camera?

    Anybody without a camera, of course, can be presumed to be up to no good. And anyone looking somewhere they oughtn't (which can easily be detected by placing small IR reflectors or similar in "safe to view" zones) will be instantly detected.

    If all this sounds ridiculous, imagine what Churchill would have said about having half a million video cameras watching the city back in the '40s. We shall fight on the beaches, in the fields and on the streets - but what happens when we must fight ourselves?

  9. brian
    Unhappy

    One CCTV camera for every 4 spectators?????

    Are they nuts? Will you be able to see the track and field events on the other side of the bank of cameras? I'm sorry, but this just proves that the police think that we are ALL guilty - we have just not been caught yet.

    Besides CCTV is a waste of money as far as crime prevention is concerned. If CCTV prevented crime then there would be no programmes of the "Criminals on Camera" variety. All CCTV does is let you watch the crime in progress from the comfort of your armchair.

  10. jim

    Facial recognition

    Yeah right.....bald headed full bearded terrorists all look the same.

    Prepare for the system to fail at the first hurdle.

  11. Wonderkid
    Stop

    Oh give me a break already!

    If this is to deter or prevent terrorism then it is a complete waste of time and money. a) A terrorist will simply act like any other legally registered member of the public - like those who hijacked the aircraft on 9/11. b) The money spent on this massive opportunity to monitor as many people as possible - under the guise of preventing terrorism, is just another excuse to encroach on our privacy - would be far better spent on building inner city sports complexes around London that last well beyond 2012. c) The next terrorist attack will be nuclear, and no amount of DNA fingerprinting, CCTV or else will prevent it. The answer has, does and always will lie in public diligence. For that is how most criminals are exposed and caught - assuming they survive, and if they don't well, then there is even less point in having a CCTV system for tracking them down after the 'event!' What will help is metal / explosive / radiation detectors to make it hard for guns and/or bombs to be bought in before or during the event.

  12. Christoph
    Flame

    Guess who is Watching You

    "Once established its likely the police would resist any attempt to dismantle the system."

    Yes, the BBC story says "It is understood the command centre would remain in place after the Olympics."

    So not only do they sneak in their super surveillance centre, they get it for free after making us pay for it as part of the Olympics.

    And does anyone think for a moment that they will delete any of the information they gather on the workers, athletes, and spectators? Or that they won't hand copies to the US, and to every European police force?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Police state

    And some idiots think we live in a free country

  14. Mark Allen
    Alert

    Have you look at a builder's hands?

    I think this is a great idea. If a "palm reader" is going to fail anywhere, it will be trying to read the hand of a builder. Day to day, different tasks, and a different mess on the hands... paint, plaster, cement, cuts, bruises, oil.... their hands will not be the same from one day to the next.

    Even facial recognition will be a joke... clearly the people planning this have not stood out in the cold on a building site all day... Lots of changes to facial colours and texture...

    So we will have a nice big "experiment" which should fail in a nice dramatic fashion. I can see a carpenter turning up to work, finding the palm reader refusing to let him in. And that carpenter apply a gentle "adjusting tap" from his hammer to the reader.... :-)

    Yep - this is going to go down great with all those builders stuck in a queue trying to clock in... I can't see them being happy to wait as the equipment keeps playing up... yet another thing to blame for construction delays... :-)

    So all good - this will end up as great negative publicity for ID Cards and readers. :-)

  15. heystoopid
    Pirate

    This is

    This is total lunacy at it's best or the "Peter Principle" at it's finest !

    other forms showing up lunacy lifted from boing boing

    1/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/illegalphotos/

    2/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubin110/2311540111/

    3/ http://craphound.com/images/fearmongering.png.jpg

    And the cause of it all

    4/ http://www.met.police.uk/campaigns/campaign_ct_2008.htm

    One can imagine that the construction workers building delivery trucks and other modern equipment required to erect cheap buildings fast will be tied up in so much red tape the concrete in the trucks would be set before it passed through the third check point !

    But since all major building firms are heavily reliant on undocumented workers at every level on all projects they are involved in getting people to work on site will become a living nightmare !

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    but the scariest bit......

    From the bbc coverage (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/london_2012/7277918.stm) there is the prospect of the police not even needing their CCTV system to track you.

    "Tracking technology is being developed - a spectator will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets."

    would put me off buying a ticket.....

  17. Morely Dotes
    Paris Hilton

    Oh, jolly good!

    With construction delays caused by the pork-barrel biometrics readers, and "labor strikes caused by irritated construction workers, there won't be any terrorist problems at the 2012 Olympics, because the job won't be completed before 2020 t the earliest.

    For some reason, as I read the article, I kept thinking the cops and politicians were trying to arrange for their very own Special Olympics.

    Paris, because even she wouldn't be quite this thick.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    London! yet another reason to let it sink

    Well since i live in the other bit of the UK that isnt London, i cant say i give a dam. Of course i am a increasingly tired that the Olympics are sucking up my taxes faster than a MP's expense account not to mention causing a drain of jobs from everywhere decent to that hell hole of a city. It also goes without saying that we will probably the first country to have a net loss larger than our actual spend as a result of the Olympics and without any real facilities to show for it bar a few ZIL lanes running everywhere.

    However we can now finally say with some certainty that the Olympics will in fact leave us with a state controlled CCTV network that is so all snooping it beggars belief. I cant blame the Skynet Artifical Intelligence for wanting to Nuke us, we have lost our minds.

    Of course it wont work that well to start with but they will chuck enough money at it over the next 20 years to make it work.

    The plus side is that we have great footage of every attack for liveleak.com. It wont actually save anyone's life or reduce crime, you actually need to do stuff to stop that.

    Every story i read i think that's it we have hit rock bottom and then the following week they prove me wrong. National ID Cards, National Road Pricing, National Number Plate recognition, National DNA data base and now a spy film class CCTV system that you just know will be exported in time.

    Wheres my tinfoil hat and my passport, I'm leaving the country .......... well after my tan fades i will ........ i dont want some senior cops ordering my death as I board a flight because their too dumb to know what they hell they are doing.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Britain is Half Life 2

    They need those small flying HL 2 camera bots that take your photo every now and again. Surely, this is tech worth investing in.

    The UK is becoming a huge experimental human prison. What's next, a series of sirens going off for the government approved breakfast, lunch, dinner and bed times? Waaaaaail ! Time to get up citizens.....

    Olympics go to hell !

  20. kain preacher

    chipped and dipped

    I'm still waiting till they bar code and chip every one

  21. jolly
    Unhappy

    The last enemy

    It's depressing but the more I read along these lines the more our country is starting to look like the one portrayed on the BBC's "The Last Enemy".

    @AC who quoted the BBC ("Tracking technology is being developed - a spectator will be tracked from the venue to his or her home with these tickets."). Well whenever you buy any ticket with a valid credit/debit card they can link your arrival at the venue with your address. So all they'll need to do for the olympics is insist you pay by card.

    I wonder how the olympic security bods and police intend to make sure the aggregates and materials being delivered are what they say they are. And what about the electical equipment being delivered. A box of wires can do lots of things (i.e., control lighting, deliver audio to speakers, detonate a load of powder that looks like plaster but is actually something far more potent).

    And assuming the people who would try to blow stuff up intend to include themselves in the body count then they're going to be entering with a valid ID anyway. So the system won't stop the terrorists getting in.

    Ho hum, at least someone's making a lot of money and pushing their own agenda (of putting us all under a microscope) with the full support of the government and media.

    I can only shake my head and sigh.

  22. Richard
    Coat

    The only sure way of identifying builders

    Is arse crack recognition.

    Mine's the one that's just a little too short at the back.

  23. Steve

    Remind me again

    Why anyone in London wants the Olympics?

  24. Daniel Barnes

    That's almost £20 per person!

    I cannot believe how much this government is spending on the olympics, it's just a bunch of games that I couldn't give a rats ass about! £20 is just on security (that's bound to increase), how much more money are they going to waste in bringing the olympic games to london? If the government started using the money we give them on things we need, like schools/hospitals/police/etc rather than things THEY want then this country would be a much better place to be.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    tip of the iceberg

    I wonder if Reed Elsivier are in on this... i.e. not just the video/book/publishing stuff, but the fact that they own ChoicePoint and Lexis Nexis in the US... better known as 'data-mining' companies that provide the US Govt with in-depth info on any American in the blink of an eye... is this an quiet import of the US Homeland Security anal approach to the UK? God help the UK if politicians ever think they can grasp the basic US approach (read; do it in crayon and using very short simple words), let alone understand enough of it to make any decision [oh, thats what overpaid consultants are for - make a decision, give it to the minister, sign the "not my problem its yours" sheet, and walk away with the money].

    How many of you have read "No place to Hide" by Robert O'Harrow... ISBN# 0-141-02483-6.. well worth it.... it decribes whats coming to your town soon

    Lastly, technology won't solve this problem: its a human thing - until you get contractors and developers who actively want the security tight instead of focusing on their bottom line, it won't happen (the technology, or ultimately as someone has said already, the Olympics itself... heres one up the nose for ya: if the Greeks can piss around for years and then deliver in the last few months on their Olympic constructions, and it was good, without this sort of techie crap they are proposing in the UK, what does that say about the Poms? oops, what was that Dome thingie again?)

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Chip them all !

    That should be fun - building workers tend to work with their hands (shoveling concrete and suchlike) and are most likely to have their fingerprints damaged and unreadable. Chip them all, they'll probably be foreign anyway !

  27. David Evans
    Black Helicopters

    @Steve

    I've yet to meet anyone in London who really gives a toss about the Olympics. If it was the World Cup, that would be different...

    Its becoming increasingly clear to me that the whole Olympic bid was just a massive Trojan Horse operation to bring in automated social control and billing. London will be no safer after all of this, just even more expensive and a lot creepier.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Film all MPs?

    The answer is to install cameras in the homes, offices, cars and meeting rooms of all MPs. Also publish the position data from their tracking devices (a.k.a. their mobile phones).

    It's important to show leadership: what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

    If they've nothing to hide, they've nothing to fear.

    It'll be a useful social experiment and more fun than big brother. Especially if we can talk to them. After all, they wanted the job.

  29. Spleen

    Re: Steve

    Anyone running a construction company with a brother-in-law in government will be coining it in off government contracts. Ditto media consultants, recruitment agencies, burger vans and all the other ancillary stuff.

    The political establishment gets to dole out pork, puff themselves up, enjoy free tickets to the best seats and generally do what politicians and civil servants do instead of being productive members of society.

    Joe Bloggs might complain about the increased burden on his tax bill but he'll probably be pacified when he opens the Sun and gets the usual "back Britain fly the flag here's some tits" journalistic opium that keeps the masses docile.

    Giving London the Olympics was the most irresponsible decision since Munich. Anyone could guess that NeoLabour would use it as an excuse for a massive expansion of pork and government power. Actually, probably including Munich, since Hitler didn't need an excuse.

  30. 3x2
    Black Helicopters

    HMP UK - You just haven't been caught yet

    From the BBC story <...>it is hoped all these cameras can be used in a coordinated way - and fed into a purpose-built command centre - to provide a "soft-touch approach" to the police effort "rather than have a police officer on every corner".<...>

    So just to clarify "rather than have a police officer on every corner" they want them in a command centre watching the collective output of 500,000 live video feeds?

    And all of this will be left in place after the event - can anyone spell creepy surveillance state?

    Waaaaaail ! Time to get up citizens..... indeed.

    V for Vendetta anyone?

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Where to start with this one...

    Waste of my tax payer money - and they wonder why people want to avoid paying taxes...

    How much further over budget will it go between the next FOUR years!?

    Using the useless waste of space Olympics to bring the total surveillance society closer through the backdoor.

    Who will be watching all those cameras and making decisions based on what they're watching?

    How much will Sky/Endemol bid to be able to show the footage?

    Spreading lies, fear, etc...

    When will government ministers agree to be tracked, recorded/bugged and filmed first - start with Ken Livingston, Gordon Brown, His-Tonyness and Blunkett.

    When will the No2ID lot link the old Nazi tagging of Jews to that of the new ID-card measures?

    When will the people wake up and Fight the Power instead of just talking about how bad things are!

  32. micheal
    Alert

    Can you imagine the conversation

    Ultra Secure Headquarters :- we need to update with the ID's and data for this weeks new starters

    Olympic Security Office (based in UK.GOV office) :- I thought of that already, the disc's in the post and unencrypted so you dont lose the password, the royal mail summer-job foreign student should be bringing it about now, i marked it "sensitive olympic data" so they'll know to be careful

    The mind boggles, I still yet to see what benefits to london after the games, loads of overpriced flats to let? leisure centres that'll close due to cuts a year later? International rail terminal for illegal's to get in easier by? few jobs for locals and plenty for migrants?.....all the past olympic cities still paying the price 20 years after, some have vast olympic-made ghetto's that now cost more to re-regenerate

  33. Christoph
    Black Helicopters

    Don't worry chaps - it's even worse

    I just checked that Beeb story that Anonymous Coward pointed to.

    And found this:

    "Dividing London into three security zones to help make the arrangements more effective".

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    @Don't worry chaps - it's even worse

    Ohhh! Can I live in the "Green-Zone"...?

    Or will it be like the 0171 vs 0181 phone zones...

    Or will it be like the Rich/government zone vs the Plebs...

  35. Luther Blissett

    @ AC

    > "When will the No2ID lot link the old Nazi tagging of Jews to that of the new ID-card measures?"

    I have heard first hand accounts of WWII soldiers shooting to miss. Is this the same sort of thing?

  36. Dale

    More cameras are less effective

    There must be a point at which adding more cameras actually makes them all less effective at doing whatever it is they are supposed to be doing, because there would be so many pictures for someone to have to watch, most of them would go unwatched or get a cursory glance at best.

  37. Claire Rand

    1984, again

    read the book, forget the story, forgte the outdated tech, but read the book..

    note the continuous state of war (war on terror/ war on drugs/ war on xxxxxx) used to keep people in line. changing the very language to control thoughts (PC anyone?)

    ok reality is not thi extreme as yet. but the book was meant as a warning, not a handbook

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