London's Metropolitan Police flip the switch: Smile, fellow citizens... you're undergoing Live Facial Recognition The Metropolitan Police are using live facial recognition (LFR) in various locations in central London today after spending two years testing the technology. Most recently spotted at Oxford Circus, the vans are equipped with NeoFace's recognition software which runs captured images against a pre-specified list of wanted crimes …
No-one would have believed in the twentieth year of the twentyfirst century that more and more of this world was being watched keenly and closely by tiny intelligences and yet full of their own importance; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter, unaware or uncaring that the tiny intelligences were convinced of the wrong doing of every human.........
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter, unaware or uncaring that the tiny intelligences were convinced of the wrong doing of every human......... .... Chris G
..... and are thus themselves resolved and EMPowered to do everything almightily different and better than ever the systems of the establishment are programmed to do, for the intelligences they use are of an infinitely greater source with immaculate forces, is something to look forward to, Chris G.
SMARTR IT guarantees it Presented for Beta Future Command with AI Control of the Virtual Machine with Global Operating Devices ...... you know, those simply complex ubiquitous keyboard interfaces at practically everyone's fingertips these 0days, nowadays.
Coming now soon to all media screens surrounding you for escaping to ..... and no kidding.
I read somewhere about the UK loosing its protection under GDPR, google has already emailed UK registered users apparently? Would this allow police forces to use Facebook/social media photos with their LFR system giving them a bigger pool of known faces, even if those individuals have a criminal record or not?
Am I alone in thinking that the Met's urge to push this out so quickly is to get some high profile "wins" under their belt to use in the future debates about regulation of the technology.
Being able to put forward the argument that "Look it let us find these lost children, and we caught a person accused of rape and a serial parking offender" will moderate the public abhorrence of the overall Orwellian project. Taken to the extreme the Met would argue that we all should have implanted transponders scanned by readers at every road intersection and rail station entrance.
Of course the public will never know how the "watch list" will be construcred and even if it is used. Ultimatly the recordings will be archived along with the identitues of everyone seen in the area at that time.
Very soon policing will be carried out by a bunch of crapita operatives, sat behind banks of screens. There will be no visual police presence in streets consequently the deterent effect will be lost.
The Met, and other forces, are forgetting that policing should be balanced and with public support. They don't get mine for this invasive, suspect technology.
Any further news about the BTP use of the tech around rail hubs?
@Barrie Shepherd: "The Met, ,,,, are forgetting that policing should be balanced and with public support."
I think the modern police force have pretty much torn up the nine principles and are now just using a paramilitary handbook. OK, so they have some right scrotes to deal with, but I'm not prepared to be treated like a scrote because of that. Even scrotes need habeas corpus.
To counter NeoFace, everyone in London should buy and wear one of these: https://www.celebrity-facemasks.com/products/neo-matrix-celebrity-face-mask.html
This is the state of affairs and it isn't going to change, so we're just going to have to figure out how to implement this in the most effective and least intrusive way possible. Only high quality images in the database, preferably including part or full profile; Secondary camera to zoom in on subjects of interest for a high-res comparison; decently speced computers; parameters tuned to err on the side of caution; a human in the loop to make the final call.
That is universally true. Police everywhere around the world is the blunt end of the state's domestic power. It's not meant to protect, it's meant to suppress. Criminals just happen to be closest and the most immediate target when it swings, but by no means the only ones hit.
There are a number of companies doing research into, and building prototypes of what they call Adversarial glasses - essentially mundane looking glasses that baffle facial recognition systems, making it impossible to be recognised - often even as a human face, nevermind a specific person.
The ones i've seen definitely look just like normal prescription glasses. If facial recognition becomes to pervasive, this technology will continue to develop to match it.
There are other technologies being developed as well, what amounts to optical masking lights built into hats and clothing, preventing cameras from getting a decent picture.
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