Warning over ‘alarming escalation’ of surveillance in London
Key Points
- Big Brother Watch has condemned the wider rollout of static LFR cameras across London.
- Head of Advocacy Jack Coulson warned that this amounts to an intrusion of personal privacy and runs contrary to principles of policing.
- LFR has resulted in the wrongful arrest and detention of people due to false positives generated by technology, which has been shown to have a racial bias.
- Big Brother Watch has called on the Met to pause its rollout until Parliament has had the opportunity to legislate on the legality of LFR cameras.
Civil rights advocacy Big Brother Watch has called on the Metropolitan Police to stop its rollout of static Live Facial Recognition (LFR) cameras across London.
This comes as the Met announced it would roll out more lamppost-mounted, static LFR cameras across high-traffic areas of the city following the successful pilot of the technology in Croydon.
The Met has cited widespread public support for the technology and its previous success in facilitating arrests during a pilot deployment in Croydon.
Big Brother Watch Head of Advocacy Jack Coulson has warned that while tackling crime is in the public interest, the methods used by the Met are an intrusion on personal privacy.
“Expanding the use of live facial recognition to static cameras is an alarming escalation of an intrusive technology which has already scanned the faces of millions of innocent Londoners,” Coulson said.
“Forcing people to enter a digital police line-up in the capital’s busiest and most popular destinations is an affront to the idea that you should not have to identify yourself to the police if you have done nothing wrong. To see a play, you must now pay with your privacy.”
The Met maintains that LFR cameras are only activated when officers are present and conducting a deployment. Unlike previous rollouts where a van was required to operate nearby in the area, however, these static cameras can be operated remotely from a central command centre.
Each deployment of the technology uses a bespoke, intelligence-led watchlist created less than a day beforehand, which the Met says is then deleted immediately after the deployment.
False positives are a reality
The pilot deployment of static LFR cameras in Croydon led to just one false positive, despite facilitating arrests at a rate of one every 34 minutes during operation.
False positives are a possibility with this technology, however, as evidenced by the arrest of Alvi Choudhury earlier this year.
Choudhury was arrested while working from home as a software developer, and he was detained for 10 hours for a burglary he never committed in a city he had never visited.
“Just this February, Alvi Choudhury was arrested, held for ten hours, and only released at 2 am for a crime committed in a city he’d never visited,” Coulson said.
“It is predictable, given the technology’s racial bias, that Mr Choudhury was confused for another Asian man.”
As mentioned in a briefing to Government by the Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group (BEFG), racial bias in LFR systems is a widely reported and acknowledged problem.
“Legislation to regulate the police’s use of facial recognition is expected in the Autumn. Yet the police are rushing ahead with AI monitoring of the public under their own rules,” Coulson said.
“We are calling on the Met to stop this experiment until, at least, Parliament has spoken. Policing by consent is a cultural inheritance we must protect.”
“Permanent biometric surveillance of the public square is incompatible with that ideal,” he said.
