Mainly what it will likely be used for is similar to how cell phone tower data is used today. It gives you a list of people in an area at a given time, which you can correlate with other information like whether they are there often or out of habit, and whether they are breaking a routine.
Add ALPR camera data, and a public records graph, and using those selectors against other areas means you can narrow a list of suspects fairly quickly.
Arguably, surveillance merely polarizes crime instead of reducing it, where if good people are too worried about the consequences of defending themselves, it creates an effective %100 success rate for committing crimes and an insignificant chance of eventual charges - there is little disincentive to to criminals becoming super aggressive.
London is already the most surveiled city in the western world, and yet still notorious for violent street crime. Adding facial recognition to the current regime of cell towers, ALPR, cameras at every corner, cab cameras, and public transit cameras, is meaningless.
What is most likely is that facial recognition will be used the way it is used everywhere else in the world - for political pacification, not crime reduction.
"London [...] still notorious for violent street crime"
Which I find fairly strange all things considered - the crime index (https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp - admittedly this might not be the most accurate source) shows quite a gap between other similar cities like New York - a fairly common comparison. As a resident of a few years now, I definitely wouldn't say I felt London to have that kind of feel, if anything violent crime has the effect of being shocking because it is so uncommon.
I find it quite disheartening to see London's relatively soft-touch approach lose out over "automated" policing, there's quite a bit of grumbling lately over the reduction in actual people on the streets, mainly over police cuts.
It is one of those glass half full things. If you have been the victim of a mugging then you will start seeing scooter-gangs everywhere, before you never noticed them and crime was only something you read about.
Incidentally these guys are quite a London thing, so if you are at the traffic lights on your bike/scooter/car and you see two or more scooters with no number plates and pillion passengers then you might want to start saying your prayers.
The former chancellor of the exchequer had his phone nabbed by the legendary moped gang thieves so it is not only in areas that are deprived where crime is a problem. Don't walk and text in Central London, you will only be asking for it.
They wear helmets and balaclavas underneath so I do not see how facial recognition can help. Only arming the public with fully automatic assault weapons can deter these ultra-violent thugs who happen to normally be only 15 years old.
I used to study architecture, and about ten years ago (after drinking too much) decided to visit an architecturally famous but rough estate at night. (It was Robin Hood Gardens.) I walked around and the place was, most significantly, empty. I got hailed aggressively by some guys but a fast walk was enough to get out of there without being confronted.
There is danger, all right, but I think you would probably agree that it's not the obvious, conspicuous risks that lead to violent crime. It's the places that don't seem dangerous where it happens, because those are the places where victims are present and not focusing on their safety.
London police are also addicted to cctv. A crime without footage isnt investigated. Today they only investigate motivations and wintess reliability. If the physical act cannot be confirmed with footage, it didn't happen. So we need either more cameras to catch everything, or far fewer to get cops to start investigate crime again.
I would argue, that Brexit was a faint sign, that UK still have hope.
Brexit was 'No' vote to thought-police, political-corruption, and selective outrage.
It was a 'yes' vote for national sovereignty, and empowered diversity of opinion (where a diversity means to be 'different' compared than the 'rich /powerful/famous' line of vote)
To me the early signs of Dictatorship are:
a) Uniformity of thought (and, therefore, active thought police).
b) The culture of Selective outrage (that then leads to selective law enforcement for your citizens).
c) Paid (and therefore 'fake') victims.
d) The identification if a 'single powerful enemy' that must be attacked preventively (or else everybody will get hurt)
---
So a treatment that prevents Dictatorship, is to ensure that the economical, political and military power of a country (or a union) is well spread, and controlled by local votes (as much as possible), rather than representative vote
It does bring 'less efficiency', but it is that type of entropy (introduced by uncertainty of diverse opinion of larger populous) -- that is necessary to prevent dictatorships.
'Almost a million crimes a year are disappearing from official figures as chief constables attempt to meet targets, a study by the police watchdog has disclosed.'
We have reached the levels of desperation whereby the police are willing to employ a technology that clearly does not work, in order to pursue a goal of policing with fewer police officers.
You only have to look at the widespread increase in CCTV use in Britain. Now when you get mugged in London the police can get you a little video of your hooded attackers for posterity. Except they only have time to go through the recordings if you got murdered, otherwise you will just get a crime number.
1) It clearly does not work (as opposed to "it has a low accuracy" which just means they will have to filter manually) and
2) They are pursuing a goal of policing with fewer police officers and
3) Having a working solution would mean they could police with fewer police officers (cameras can't detain suspects or intervene when problems arise, AND police officers don't carry a mental database of all suspects like a computer could have, so having cameras does not replace having police officers).
Scooter crime is exploding in London and police numbers have been falling for a decade.
Personally I've had 3 scooter thefts on the past year, including a bike jacking at a red light - more a robbery than theft.
All these criminals wear balaclavas even if they're not wearing helmets, and they're used to using countermeasures against CCTV, so facial recognition isn't likely to make a big difference to them.
False positives vs false negatives. Most crimes are committed by young men, but most young men aren’t criminals. Same thing happened with medical tests for rare conditions — if you have rates of 5% false positive (0% false negative) and 1% criminality rate, then ~84% of those you shake up are innocent.
Scooter crime seems to be committed by men under 30, are you talking age-related profiling? So shake-down a couple of million people and you will probably find the evidence you want?
How is attacking the demographics of crime working for America, and the other countries that do that? As far as I understand, the efficacy of profiling is extremely poor
Thankfully, racial-profiling is against the law in the US. Unfortunately, some involved in law enforcement do it anyway (sometimes unintentionally), and when they are caught they are disciplined.
Under Trump and Attorney General Sessions, the Department of Justice said they were shutting down investigations of police departments for civil rights issues. (I don't remember the exact details.)
It's cheap and efficient to wear a mask, where it is the taxpayer's money being wasted on facial recognition systems, and on top of that: cameras don't prevent, and are not even being used to prosecute criminals, there are not enough resources to do that, as someone else already pointed it out:
> You only have to look at the widespread increase in CCTV use in Britain. Now when you get mugged in London the police can get you a little video of your hooded attackers for posterity. Except they only have time to go through the recordings if you got murdered, otherwise you will just get a crime number.
But hey, have fun with illusion of safety, deprived freedom and a complete waste of money.
As a resident of the UK, I perceive a strong political incentive to persue more laws and stronger enforcement of and punishment for violating those laws.
The UK has until recently been trying to follow a policy of reduced public spending and reduced government borrowing. It is natural to assume that any new technology is only being used on this basis.
That doesn’t mean this perception is correct, and the current state of the UK looks to me like they’re trying to promise all things to all people, failing to do almost anything, and increasing annoying everyone as a result — so there isn’t any reason to assume logical coherence either.
Your link just explains that they’re trying to reduce the gap between tax income and expenditure, but the absolute level of expenditure (my link) has gone up every year (in real terms too)!
As a citizen of the UK I can tell you that until Brexit became along the political narrative since Cameron became PM had been all about 'The Cuts'. The fact that, despite widespread cuts to the civil service and the police, spending has increased just goes to show that ideology has become more important than sense in 2018.
Talking about the specifics however, the number of police officers in the UK have been reduced by around 19 thousand. Since that only leaves 126k I hope you will find that significant. I find the continued expenditure on unproven gadgets rather distasteful against this backdrop.
> 1) It clearly does not work (as opposed to "it has a low accuracy" which just means they will have to filter manually)
When you point accuracy that poor at a sample so large the number of false positives is so colossally large that the resources to 'filter manually' are large, meanwhile a free- country is branding huge numbers of innocent people as possible suspects. So no it doesn't work. For it to work in a free-country we should be looking at five-nine accuracy at least.
> 3) Having a working solution would mean they could police with fewer police officers
Say you have 10,000 people attending a football match. Your intelligence suggests a known hooligan is amongst the crowd. How do you search for him and why wouldn't facial recognition be helpful?
As long as you have the resources to sort through 145 people to see if they are your man[0].
The really worrying thing for me is they use the excuse that they are looking for
> "potential terrorist targets"
and then say
> "poor quality images" supplied by agencies including Uefa
UEFA is the governing body of the European football championship, now obviously famed for fighting terrorism. Terrorism is the excuse they love to use to take away civil liberties.
It continues to worry me
> over 450 arrests
and then discusses 2 convictions. It is a very worrying world we are slipping into where getting lots of arrests counts as a result
> no-one had been arrested after an incorrect match
This is not for the police to decide, it is for the courts. Hi-five 450 and 2 convictions of note
> The technology has also helped identify vulnerable people in times of crisis.
So it's already being used more generally than arresting terrorists, and football hooligans! It crept up on us over the course of one article!
What I am afraid is that we could get an even worse problem then the DNA and fingerprints issue where so called experts will put innocent people in prison. "The computer tells us that X was at the crime scene without reasonable doubt, with the AI software could measure this blurred image and the computer experts are sure that is almost impossible for the software to be wrong.
But as long as they don't rely on this single evidence, that should be fine right? If someone's hair, fingerprints all match the ones in crime scene, even if the software only have 90% confidence, it should be good enough. Btw from a blurred image, it's fundamentally impossible to have around 100% accuracy.
Do not underestimate the ability of juries to be swayed by impressive sounding claims. Nor their ability to be swayed, and dismiss clear mitigations, by one dominant or eloquent individual.
"Our facial recognition has over 90% accuracy" from the prosecution's expert can easily become "clearly guilty" in the jury room.
A good book on this is Reckoning With Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer, who uses several examples from healthcare.
Often these numbers are given as percentages, and he says that most people (even the doctors and nurses administering the tests) don't really understand them, and that we should use natural numbers (as Ben Goldacre does in the example you provide).
He uses examples from cancer screening and HIV testing.
Snark aside, it's important. There probably should be someone adequately numerate on every jury.
Most juries will have around half, perhaps more, who've done nothing at all mathematical since school 10-45 years previously and think percentages are in the difficult part of maths (ie it's more than basic arithmetic). HN is going to be very unrepresentative for numeracy. :)
You want them to achieve "beyond reasonable doubt" conclusions from probabilities, percentages, false positive rates and perhaps standard deviations, well you may as well be making your case in French or Ancient Greek that they can pick a few part-understood bits from.
> Do not underestimate the ability of juries to be swayed by impressive sounding claims. Nor their ability to be swayed, and dismiss clear mitigations, by one dominant or eloquent individual.
This. You will have a hard time contending with pretty graphs, confusing numbers and a guy with an impressive title/badge/degree explaining why you're guilty.
Eventually, for the sake of cost savings abd efficiency, all other means of investigation will be cut, wound down and abolished. Then you have Gilliam’s Brazil, and you won’t have any recourse because you won’t know any better either
Judges and jury can easily be convinced, you add some other "evidence" into the mix like "The buy is listening to rock mustic or plays violent video games" maybe some racist stereotypes and you got convince ted. This things actually happen with bad DNA, fingerprints specialists, the one that will hunt me is with a fireman that testified that he is very sure a house was intentionally put on fire and the father was found guilty of killing his family)it was an accidental fire.
My point is that you get some bad evidence, some bad eye witnesses or profiles and you get convicted, especially if the judge or jury gets tricked by the media in general on how good the forensic science actually is.
You're being downvoted, but that's a pretty realistic scenario, at least from a technical perspective. I can easily imagine a system which uses facial recognition to narrow down to a choice of a few "best matches" (using police mugshots, passport or driver licence photos, or whatever they have at their disposal) and then crowdsource it via Mechanical Turk or even something like Recaptcha to select the right one.
A down vote without a comment / explanation doesn't help much, if at all. It's vague. It's lazy. It provides no context. As the definition of communication goes, it's pointless.
I don't sweat the down votes. Most of the time I'm proud of them.
In this case it's probably the same people who like the idea of USPS photographing their mail so they can see what they're getting, not realizing they're actually being sold surveillance as a survice. That is, they're happy about it.
You are unlikely to arrest someone based on a mechanical turk results, since unsurprisingly you can look at photos yourself to double check.
It's also pretty common to get data rated by multiple people to cross-check how certain they are, and to keep track of individuals' accuracy and exclude inaccurate raters from your tasks.
If you assume one of the main directives of British police is to frustrate radical political change and forestall revolution, none of their actions are surprising.
I don't see it as being that grand, at least not at the moment. I think we are very far from something like May '68 or Soviet revolution. A lot of theory has been dedicated to figuring out why we are in this situation in which there is a completely inactive working class with very little drive behind them; various explanations have been given, though - Marx's critique of ideology, Althusser's explanations of ISAs and RSAs, Debord's of society of the spectacle, the Frankfurt School's concentration on mass culture changing what we define as being rational (and the closing off of the "extremes", for it is no longer "reasonable" to operate outside of the "democratic" system etc.) all the way to newer ideas; I'm reading "Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire at the moment, which carries the following rather provocative tagline: "Why do people work for other people? This seemingly naïve question is more difficult to answer than one might at first imagine, and it lies at the heart of Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital."
I don't know what policing is for anymore. Crime is a part of the cost of a free society. Fighting crime with such tools takes away a lot of freedom. This is a power grab, I cannot imagine it helping anyone. Maybe it will solve a few petty crimes, but it is a squeeze on freedom in my opinion.
I realize it's partially rhetorical, but I keep saying to the people who are trying to shove this onto us, "You first."
Police still fight wearing and using body cams. Governments are becoming more obstreperous, recalcitrant, and outright -- and arguable, illegally -- uncooperative with respect to Freedom of Information Act and other like document production procedures and requests.
It seems, the powers that want this, want no aspect of this "transparency" for themselves.
I'd like to see a private initiative and cameras take to tracking the elite and the "nothing to hide" people.
Their actions and behavior already tell me, that they have plenty to hide.
Let's see them "live their everyday life", as they've known it, in the face of relentless tracking and "accountability".
Is this something that will eventually spread to every single democracy? In a vacuum it does not sound that awful. You can identify illegal actions and individuals rapidly and effectively. As democracy entails a regular shifting of individuals, it seems that the chances of any given democracy choosing to consistently reject such utility in the longrun approaches zero. Even if the vast majority oppose it, opinions quickly change after a frightful act when whatever minority seeks to act such systems can effectively leverage the fear to achieve their goal.
And if the answer to this question is yes, then where does it end? Or will democracies invariably end up sacrificing any and all freedoms and rights of privacy, that can be sacrificed, in the name of security?
Genuine question: With the GDPR in effect, don't all CCTV operators in the EU more or less need to have facial recognition in order to comply with any "please show me any images you have of me and then delete them" requests? (obviously they wouldn't need to run the facial detection always, only on select faces when requested)
GDPR is interpreted and enforced at the national level. I'm going to go ahead and assume the British data regulator won't rule against its own government.
Sure, how about private companies who have CCTV then? Could someone just 'ddos' a supermarket chain by getting a hundred people to all ask for their CCTV footage?
They don't. See article 11: "If the purposes for which a controller processes personal data do not or do no longer require the identification of a data subject by the controller, the controller shall not be obliged to maintain, acquire or process additional information in order to identify the data subject for the sole purpose of complying with this Regulation."
Surely someone will come up with a device that can mask your face from cameras without literally putting a mask on. I dont know what that would be or if that would be made illegal or not, because surely they couldnt make a literal halloween mask illegal. I would buy that device.
Maybe highly reflective makeup in IR/UV but not visible wavelength. Apply random patterns, or perhaps specific patterns designed to confuse the nets? I don't know what wavelengths common cameras for this kind of use case operate across.
Unless there's a lot of people wearing these, it won't be too hard to track the footage of the person wearing it back to before they put it on or when they came out of their home wearing it.
Surprised no one has mentioned UV-emitting LEDs embedded in a hat. No visible light emitted, but looks like a spotlight to cameras & hides the face in the blinding light.
As a security concerned British person, this throws multiple red flags to me.
1. A Country that failed to upgrade it's NHS systems from Windows XP after 10+ billion pounds of investment and subsequently got hacked, leading to many deaths - scares me. The data they are collecting is very intimate. If it was leaked, somebody could track persons of interest (government officials, politicians, journalists, undercover police, etc), tell whether somebody is having an affair, make correlations between friends groups - tonnes of data. They could potentially figure out where you work, where you go for lunch, who you meet, who you phone - it's just too much.
2. Today it's about catching "known" criminals, tomorrow it's about predicting future criminals and sending them to state "rehabilitation" camps (just look at China), selling you data to the highest bidder (it's happened on the Council level in the past) or some other ridiculous use. Blocking websites on the internet used to be about removing exploitation of young persons, now it's used to block pirating of copyright material.
3. A right to be forgotten - if you've done nothing wrong, you shouldn't be tracked. I can understand the need to hold this sort of data for a short period of time, but after this it should be deleted. I think privacy is a fundamental freedom, along with freedom of speech, freedom to travel, etc.
4. The accuracy of facial detection, even if it's 99.99% for 70 million people, is still 7000 mistakes (at a massive simplification). It's actually worse than that, both the real accuracy of face detection and the error rate for specific people. It's also "easy" to trick. When it works it works well, but what about the person who is incorrectly detained, potentially injured for a crime they never committed? And that's not even taking into consideration that a lot of these face detection algorithms tend to be subtly racist (over trained on locals, badly trained on foreign persons).
5. Lack of oversight for such a powerful technology - to collect data on this magnitude is absolutely insane and needs multiple groups of people to keep it's use in check. Not just government based but also separate non-government groups which receive funding elsewhere.
That all said, I can understand the clear benefit - remove the human element from tracking these people. But with any powerful technology we must always ask - at what cost? I think this inflicts too much on a persons basic freedoms.
If the police are lacking in criminals to lock up I can suggest a few thousand in various northern cities that they've been refusing to investigate for 10-15 years.
Human rights vs protection from criminals/terrorists is a delicate balance. I am curious what are the human rights that get violated by having cameras that identify illegal activities.
The balance is between state power and civil liberties. State power is important to curtail crime and maintain order, civil liberties are an important check in preventing a state from becoming oppressive or pursuing a very unpopular course of action.
There is very little understanding in the UK, and in England in particular, that it is dangerous to allow a state to become too powerful, for its police force to be so effective that it precludes the possibility of the public removing a government that is not serving its people.
In general, AI connected to the cameras can be made to do both. This one seems to just do people. Once the system is in place, expansion of use is much easier.
>> Have you never had a speeding ticket from an automatic camera?
I don't drive, so no :)
More to the point, figuring out the speed of a moving object is not an AI task- and I don't mean that in the sense of "if it works it's not AI". I mean, really, it's not something AI was ever interested in, presumably because it's not a particularly complicated calculation, given the right equipment.
Generally, AI is interested in problems that demand, how can I put it, unorthodox solutions. Or just very tricky ones.
So the kind of thing I thought you meant was identifying, say, burglars or muggers, from video feeds etc. That sort of thing is not possible yet, certainly not outside controlled conditions ("in the lab").
> More to the point, figuring out the speed of a moving object is not an AI task- and I don't mean that in the sense of "if it works it's not AI".
Reading the number plate, on the other hand…
I would be surprised if the AI in any worthwhile self driving car couldn’t detect 90% of categories of unlawful road use.
Detecting assaults may be computationlly unreasonable at this point, but there is work on generating 3D meshes which map to all human bodies in a scene, so it’s not unreasonable to draw a line from one to the other. Identifying that a theft has occurred, however, probably can’t be done yet outside carefully controlled conditions. Yet.
(I have been given one speeding ticket, but in error because I had sold the car before the incident).
>> Detecting assaults may be computationlly unreasonable at this point, but there is work on generating 3D meshes which map to all human bodies in a scene, so it’s not unreasonable to draw a line from one to the other.
I think the closest analogy is pose estimation, where there's quite a bit of work (in particular, I think there's a lot of interest in learning to identify body postures that can lead to a fall, in order to reduce injuries to older people). I don't remember seeing work on identifying criminal intent in particular, though.
My intuition is that it's more than a matter of computational resources and will require some algorithmic advances. But, you never know.
>> (I have been given one speeding ticket, but in error because I had sold the car before the incident).
Yup. No idea how it went wrong given I only owned it for only a few weeks specially so I could sell it on behalf of my partner after she accidentally moved to America (I have a complicated reality [1]), and the DVLA sent me acknowledgment, about nine months before I got the letter from the police, that I had sold it.
[1] “And that’s how I found out that Michael Jackson works for the USAF.”
Add ALPR camera data, and a public records graph, and using those selectors against other areas means you can narrow a list of suspects fairly quickly.
Arguably, surveillance merely polarizes crime instead of reducing it, where if good people are too worried about the consequences of defending themselves, it creates an effective %100 success rate for committing crimes and an insignificant chance of eventual charges - there is little disincentive to to criminals becoming super aggressive.
London is already the most surveiled city in the western world, and yet still notorious for violent street crime. Adding facial recognition to the current regime of cell towers, ALPR, cameras at every corner, cab cameras, and public transit cameras, is meaningless.
What is most likely is that facial recognition will be used the way it is used everywhere else in the world - for political pacification, not crime reduction.