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MP Philp backs calls for ‘Orwellian’ surveillance cameras

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Orwellian: Big Brother Watch says that police use of facial recognition technology puts Britain on a par with surveillance states such as Putin’s Russia and Communist China

If it’s Thursday, it must be Facial Recognition day in Croydon town centre.

The Met Police deployed its Big Brother-style CCTV cameras on North End again last week – for the third Thursday in succession – and now Croydon South Tory MP Chris Philp wants to roll out the technology across the country to help track down people wanted for “priority offences” such as rape, violence, robbery, theft and drug-related crime.

But civil liberties groups have warned against the potential for misuse of the technology, and scientists who have studied the cameras’ work have found that at some settings, they can misidentify black people 11 times more than white people.

But with Croydon shoppers used as unwitting guinea pigs in a massive social experiment, the camera trials have found “they can catch criminals in just a fraction of the time it would otherwise take”, according to reports this week.

‘What do you mean, they are following me on secret cameras?’: Chris Philp is backing facial recognition

Philp is the policing minister, and he has urged other police forces to adopt the technology. He is citing the results in Croydon to back-up the move.

Live facial-recognition cameras were deployed in Croydon for half a day amid the Christmas shoppers on December 7 and 14, catching 17 suspects in the space of a few hours (figures for last Thursday’s dragnet operation have not been released).

On December 14, the cameras identified 22 people who were on the Metropolitan Police’s wanted list. Of those, 10 people were arrested for offences including threats to kill, domestic abuse offences, theft, bank fraud and knife crime. One detainee was found to be carrying a cross-bow.

Seven arrests were made as a result of the deployment on December 7, including a man suspected of rape and burglary, a suspected fraudster and a man wanted for grievous bodily harm.

The technology uses a CCTV feed from a police van that monitors people walking past and is linked to facial recognition software. The police upload photos of wanted criminals and the software sets off an alert when a biometric match is found. A police officer reviews the match to confirm its accuracy.

The details of anyone who is not a match are immediately and automatically deleted, according to the police.

Before deploying facial recognition cameras police forces must notify the local community via social media, leaflets and clear signage in places where it will be used – as they did again last week, including the usual tweet from the Croydon police account.

Formal notice: the police have to give a warning that they are using the cameras

Police chiefs have said the technology will cut the amount of time spent trying to identify an offender from days and months to “just minutes”.

Civil liberty groups have likened the technology to “Orwellian surveillance” and warned that it was racially biased and inaccurate.

Minister Philp said the latest tests had addressed those concerns. “This technology enables wanted criminals who would otherwise go free to get caught,” Philp told The Times.

“This has a huge potential to be scaled up to catch thousands of wanted dangerous criminals. Anyone not on the watchlist has their image deleted immediately so there are no legitimate concerns about privacy.

“This technology has been tested by the National Physical Laboratory to ensure accuracy and no bias,” Philp said.

But not for the first time, what Philp says is not exactly true.

“If the system is run at low and easy thresholds, the system starts showing a bias against black males and females combined,” Dr Tony Mansfield, the author of the National Physical Laboratory report, told MPs on a Commons committee earlier this year.

Dire warnings: civil liberties groups say the use of facial recognition is Orwellian

Dr Mansfield’s study found that the Neoface technology used by the Met and South Wales police was highly accurate and unbiased if the algorithm used to trigger a match was set at a sufficiently high face-match confidence score.

But the report found that racial bias occurs when the software is set at lower thresholds. At some settings it is 11 times more likely to misidentify black women rather than white women, for example.

Big Brother Watch, the civil liberty campaign group, said the routine use of live facial-recognition would put Britain “more in step with the likes of China and Russia” than other European democracies.

“Live facial-recognition turns the streets of Britain into AI-powered police line-ups, with innocent members of the public being subject to biometric identity checks as they go about their business,” Big Brother Watch’s Madeleine Stone said.

“Everyone wants dangerous criminals off the street, but papering over the cracks of a creaking policing system with intrusive and Orwellian surveillance technology is not the solution.

“Police have written their own extraordinarily permissive guidance on how this Dystopian technology can be used, allowing victims and witnesses of crimes to be placed on watchlists, as well as peaceful protesters and people with mental health conditions.

“The UK’s reckless approach to face surveillance makes us a total outlier in the democratic world… This Orwellian tech has no place in Britain and must be banned.”


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