Yesterday evening, the UK’s High Court ruled in favour of the Metropolitan Police in a legal challenge pertaining to the use of Live Facial Recognition Technology (LFR) across London’s transport network.
The case had been brought by Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch and Shaun Thompson, a youth worker who was previously misidentified by the technology, “over concerns it could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way”.
Specifically, their lawyers argued that the current powers claimed by police governing the use of LFR would breach articles 8, 10 & 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR),
But the High Court judges said “nah”, and dismissed the challenge in favour of the police.
Shocking, right?
The establishment judges voted in favour of the establishment cops using technology to violate people’s rights in the name of protecting the establishment.
‘Cause for a second there we didn’t know which way that might go.
The failure of this legal challenge will open the door for a national rollout of FTR across high streets and transport hubs up and down the country.
There’s a good, technical breakdown of the legal proceedings here. The claimants have already stated they plan to appeal the ruling.
Personally, I question the decision to base the case on protecting the innocent from “errors” in the LFR tech, rather than the question of the right to privacy as a general principle, but I’m not a lawyer…and they were probably going to lose whatever they said.
All in all, it’s just another example of the increasing normalization of authoritarianism in the UK.
The UK Parliament has just passed a law banning smoking for everyone born after January 1st 2009, meaning the legal age of smoking will increase by one year every year until the last smokers die off.
Some will say “that’s good, tobacco is poison”, but I will always argue that people have the right to live as wisely or foolishly as they want, as long as they are not hurting other people. And I don’t trust any government empowered to protect me “for my own good.”
Oh, and the British schools are going to be made to ban smartphones, too.
It’s all getting very claustrophobic in the UK right now.
But, in totally unrelated news, black balaclavas are relatively inexpensive and can be purchased from most major clothing retailers.
Consider stocking up, until they’re illegal too.
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