The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
The first time I taught, it was a rather interesting experience realizing how little capacity teachers actually have to deal with e.g. a disruptive student. Yeah you can pass them along to the disciplinarian or whatever, but in the end it's often empty threats - especially if the parents themselves don't particularly care, which in the case of highly disruptive students is nearly always the case. But if a class itself, or even a significant minority of a class, simply chose to stop cooperating - there's not much of anything anyone could do about it.
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
I come from Poland, where the streets are generally quite peaceful. Some of my friends from France and Germany say things feel less peaceful there. They believe immigration has played a role in that. I’m not here to agree or disagree — I can only share my own experiences.
The more disruption there is in society, the more people seem willing to accept increased control by authorities. I'm not necessarily saying this is part of some grand plan, but it does seem convenient for politicians when circumstances justify stronger control measures.
I was taking an intercity coach to Glasgow recently and a teenage kid was on his phone browsing social media without headphones. I made a comment that he should use headphones or turn the volume off. He got defensive and angry. I did not to escalate, and put my earplugs on.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
You're shifting the blame from politicians to society because in your field teachers have lost power over students. It is a huge mistake to make such a parallel. In fact, teachers have lost power because the power has become much more centralized - thanks to the politicians. You're not allowed to punish a disruptive student singlehandedly - the government took that from you and gave it to people who don't really care. The government itself can't care less. The mass hypersurveillance is not designed to solve your problems, sorry, it solves problems of people with control buttons.
I kind of wonder how much of the apparent paranoia from politicians is that they always hear the worst. I doubt its coincidence that Home Secretaries almost invariably turn into huge supporters of surveillance and cracking down on things, and I think that probably comes from the fact they get a briefing everyday from various organisations who's entire reason for existence is to find and keep track of the very worst people. If I were in that position I imagine I'd find it difficult to keep perspective as well.
I think politicians are right to be afraid. Surveillance of this magnitude isn't a ballot-box-level grievance. It's a Guy Fawkes/V-level injustice. They're stepping into territory where the very people they're supposed to stop might instead turn justified.
> The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
No, it is more like UK is now the new surveillance supermarket for EU: implementing what “works” for UK - trusted and applied technology.
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
>Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
Yeah, I mean if the UK is covering up and not counting 1000's of underaged girls being raped (with some police literally participating in the rape) the statistics are bound to look better than they are in reality.
Having said that, I don't think the surveillance state they're setting up even has the intent to change any of that.
It doesnt take a lot for people to feel less safe in their environment. So for example violent muggings on the subway may be down, but if the subway is grimy, degraded, and there are young men hanging around, people get antsy. And then selling surveillance etc is an easy push to the voters.
I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.
"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage already.
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
> The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
By the way, do anybody care what would happen (at least psychologically) in case of a massive blackout or cyber-incident?
Just imagine something akin to what happened to the Iberian peninsula a few months ago, the country goes into flame quickly preventing recovery and then it's on. Most of the systems the UK has to control its population are inoperable.
I am pretty sure it is in the back of the mind of the UK leaders when they negotiate with Russia and China....
Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other.
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
No it hasn’t become so dangerous and surveillance doesn’t help. Neither cameras nor real-name accounts actually helped to prevent crimes. Same with databases, lists or other surveillance tools. Many criminals who committed terrorism were known to the police before and they chose not to act or processes were not in place. All it does is lead to less freedom and security. The government itself is the security threat. There are always black sheep working there. They sell private details, enforce their own agenda or fail to secure sensitive information. Also extreme political parties can and did/will use it to silence undesired persons. Ask anyone who knows a bit of German history for many good examples.
That probably is true by some measure. There are a lot of cameras in the UK - rather more than when I was a nipper!
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.
>There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
The fact that these people and corporations are successful as they are is a condemnation of a subset of the people in our society and the public policy that has been pushed at their behest.
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
And Britain was Airstrip One in 1984 with most of the scenes taking place in what would have been London. Orwell definitely considered it possible that they could go that way.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Rather than dangeours, society became dumber in a sense. overload of data resulted attemps to summarize or even make anything binary (I'm Pro X or Anti X).
(the text below is opinionated so please be forgiving :) )
I can name multiple countries (as I'm coming from one) that makes more "reforms" that has or will hurt human rights.
(and we're still talking only on the "western world" which suppose to aim for freedom and human rights).
Coming from such a complex place in the world, I sadly say, that looking at stages in my life, I can easily remember the "good'ol'days" where there was one horrible thing, but I didn't know it can get worse.
I do hope society (and brits in the context of the above), will find the right balance to make a balance between feeling secured and invading privacy.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I'd bet good money "sex offenders and people wanted for the most serious crimes" end up being just a tiny fraction of the use to which the systems are put to in practice. The age verification law was supposed to be protecting children from adult content, but on the very first day they used it to lock down video of political demonstrations.
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
I seriously doubt this would stand up to a rational cost benefit analysis. If the lives of children are so very valuable I’m sure there are many more effective and cheaper things they could be doing on a per-life basis.
If you oppose it then the right will say you support criminals and illegal immigrants and the left will say you harbor racist desires to express hatred under the guise of free speech and privacy.
It's worth recognising this is a very, very limited application of facial recognition, and miles away from what China deploys (or what's regularly used in the US)
The form of government matters a lot, when evaluating its security apparatus. I feel a lot differently about the death penalty in America than in Iran too.
There is barely any demand for this from the public and a fair bit of pushback. This is something the government is just trying to ram through regardless.
Maybe that's true but there's also the down-stream effect of a persistent public voice telling us 'we should be ashamed of this country's (UK) past'. If accepted without examination, this view has rather obvious consequences as revealed in a poll from 2024 tt '17 per cent of British people would “willingly” fight for the UK in a war'. Other polls have found similar results. Why care about public order?
Usually it is more about the weakness and incapacity of the authorities that are unable to carry out their job well, or several times they are lazy to perform difficult and tedious tasks, so they put limits on everyone instead, making everyone suspect, just to catch those very very few cases, that they are increasingly unable to.
Racism/ Sinophobia makes people think that there’s a Chinese surveillance and a western surveillance when in fact there is just surveillance.
The media was the main culprit. When an article comes out they would use words that make one surveillance sound dystopian and the other sound vigilant.
The end result is that surveillance in the west has been scoring small wins under the radar and what’s happening in the UK is the “breaking stealth” of a surveillance state.
Had people just seen surveillance as surveillance none of this would have happened.
Factually, objectively false. Nobody thinks of Taiwan as having a surveillance state (or being evil along other axes), yet they're overwhelmingly (95%) Han Chinese - which is more Han Chinese than China itself. If there was any racism in these opinions whatsoever, then the people making statements about the PRC surveillance state would project the same beliefs onto Taiwan. That they don't is more than enough to prove your blatant lie completely false.
The fact is that the Chinese surveillance is just factually different than western surveillance and people are acknowledging this as true, to the point where people like you have to lie about racism to emotionally manipulate people because they can't argue their points from reality.
Making up falsehoods out of thin air is bad enough, but next time you do it, you'll save yourself personal embarrassment if the lie is at least somewhat plausible instead of dismissable with a 30-second trip to the internet.
It's a sign that Labour and Conservatives are worried they are about to lose power. They "fumbled" the economy by selling everything out to the highest bidder, created captive labour market cementing the class divide - free market only for big corporations. Now they have to protect it and themselves. They need to know what people are talking about.
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online. And apparently Chinese courts even limited facial recognition (no clue how it'll work in practice though). [1]
> China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online.
How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.
It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:
And when it comes to online behavior: 1. governments do monitor citizen's words online, like in QQ groups (something like slack / discord). 2. In most circumstances, complaining too much or even curse the country will not be punished, only those who take action in reality will be sent to prison, e.g. organizing demonstrations. 3. But discussing about things like how to build a bomb will lead to a conversation between you and the police.
I know these because I have experienced all these kinds of things in China. However, most (at least 80% of my acquaintance) do NOT care about this and support these policies. (To be honest, I personally also do not care about this kind of policy —— as long as the government does not raise taxes, I and most chinese do not care where the tax goes.)
Actually, there is no limit on facial recognition in China, government uses it, universities use it, even middle schools use it. yes there is a consent form for u to sign and you can refuse to sign it, but then lots of trouble come: e.g. you need facial recognition to enter school, so now since you didnt sign the consent form, you need to spend half an hour or more arguing with the security guard.
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
> but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah
This makes it seem like the entire UK is an urban sprawl, evenly monitored, which it isn’t.
In London you’re likely to be on someone’s camera pretty much all the time, much less so in suburbs and smaller towns. There is plenty of countryside, woodland, rural land and villages where there is no CCTV coverage at all.
> or be monitored like you would be in a large city.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for
this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
I was robbed at knifepoint on Oxford Street at about 3am while drunk, and let me say, there had to have been about 100 cameras pointed in my direction at the time of the mugging. Despite all this, the police told me nothing could be done because they were unable to acquire any useful footage at the time of the robbery. I lost a lot of faith in the Met after this incident, or that mass CCTV was even really that useful in getting a prosecution.
This is untrue? Cameras in the UK are not "just used for surveillance". The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
> The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
I'm confused as to how that isn't also "surveillance".
Being able to know where someone is on your city sure seems like it fits the bill to me, unless you're considering it "enforcement" (and different from surveillance)?
Realistically, CCTV probably will help catching and prosecuting the people who invaded your home.
But CCTV doesn’t act as a deterrent like a bobby on the street would. And because there’s a lack of visibility of criminals being caught, it just feels like the police are doing nothing.
If they’re caught down the line it’s unlikely you’d hear about it anyway. The police can’t tell you without it being proven in court unless essentially caught red-handed, and even if proven successfully that could be months or even years away.
Unfortunately, it’s impractical for them to track down your stolen items without investing much more time than the value of those goods (though I would rather they did that than, say, arrest hundreds of peaceful protestors).
This isn’t unique to the UK; my house was raided when I lived in another country and the police attitude was only to record the theft and assume it was gone for good. It really hurts and makes you feel unsafe but I doubt the police force in any major city in any country will spend time looking for stolen goods after a break-in.
(I’m not saying that the surveillance aspect isn’t a very real problem.)
Is there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms.
Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
Depends what you mean by liberty. If you mean the sort of American Libertarianism that's popular in tech circles, then no. That's never really been a thing in Europe.
If you mean liberty as in Human Rights, it waxes and wanes. Broadly speaking in the EU in the 90s/00s human rights were improved and expanded. The European human rights courts were strengthened, more laws passed aimed at opposing discrimination. And the Human rights act in the UK was codified into law in 1998, for example.
The pendulum is presently swinging the other way, mainly due to a populist revolt against mass migration to Europe. It also doesn't help that mass surveillance has become so cheap and an easy way for politicians to be 'tough on crime'. Plus American tech treats privacy as a revenue model rather than a right, and that bleeds into policy expectations via lobbying.
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
In the EU we have different liberties to the US. That doesn't necessarily make Europeans less free. For example, wlthe EU has free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders. None of which are present in the USA. Does that make Americans less free than Europeans? Some would argue so, but I don't see it.
The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
> free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders
What in the world are you talking about? The US has all of this internally. If on the one narrow point you want to claim that EU has open-borders to the rest of the world, no you don't and that's not something that's good to have anyways. Both US and European citizens are fighting their own governments to decrease immigration as polling shows large opposition to current immigration levels for many years now. A big part of the crackdown on speech in the UK is to restrict criticism of immigration policy.
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
Where is this quote from? I couldn't see it in the article.
If true, wouldn't that simply lead to wanted suspects simply avoiding the cameras, meaning innocent people who aren't monitoring these notifications to have their faces and locations captured, while criminals avoid it?
Readit News
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
The more disruption there is in society, the more people seem willing to accept increased control by authorities. I'm not necessarily saying this is part of some grand plan, but it does seem convenient for politicians when circumstances justify stronger control measures.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
The EU courts have sometimes been helpful, but the EU lawmakers have been atleast as bad as the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
As other comments have pointed out the EU has also pushed a lot of other privacy invasive legislation.
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
Dire times. Double standards are in full effect.
And yet they are still pushing [0]
[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...
Dead Comment
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
Having said that, I don't think the surveillance state they're setting up even has the intent to change any of that.
I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.
"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
Dead Comment
Must be a truly dangerous place...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
Per-capita it’s less than the US.
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
By the way, do anybody care what would happen (at least psychologically) in case of a massive blackout or cyber-incident?
Just imagine something akin to what happened to the Iberian peninsula a few months ago, the country goes into flame quickly preventing recovery and then it's on. Most of the systems the UK has to control its population are inoperable.
I am pretty sure it is in the back of the mind of the UK leaders when they negotiate with Russia and China....
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
no. you cannot. ever.
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
In the case of the UK they've often also been operating in collusion with state forces, see: Northern Ireland.
>it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
No
As shocking as this is, it's not _surprising_
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
Are you a local?
More than got away with it, actually... they prospered.
There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
https://live.staticflickr.com/2314/2171185463_92a40441ab_b.j...
The Brits have been going full steam ahead for many decades.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
Is that true, or first world just became older, not exactly safer?
Rather than dangeours, society became dumber in a sense. overload of data resulted attemps to summarize or even make anything binary (I'm Pro X or Anti X).
(the text below is opinionated so please be forgiving :) )
I can name multiple countries (as I'm coming from one) that makes more "reforms" that has or will hurt human rights. (and we're still talking only on the "western world" which suppose to aim for freedom and human rights).
Coming from such a complex place in the world, I sadly say, that looking at stages in my life, I can easily remember the "good'ol'days" where there was one horrible thing, but I didn't know it can get worse.
I do hope society (and brits in the context of the above), will find the right balance to make a balance between feeling secured and invading privacy.
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I’ll let you figure out who’s quote that is
No but the people have become so alienated and afraid as to demand it anyway.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24076378.just-17-per-cent-....
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The media was the main culprit. When an article comes out they would use words that make one surveillance sound dystopian and the other sound vigilant.
The end result is that surveillance in the west has been scoring small wins under the radar and what’s happening in the UK is the “breaking stealth” of a surveillance state.
Had people just seen surveillance as surveillance none of this would have happened.
Factually, objectively false. Nobody thinks of Taiwan as having a surveillance state (or being evil along other axes), yet they're overwhelmingly (95%) Han Chinese - which is more Han Chinese than China itself. If there was any racism in these opinions whatsoever, then the people making statements about the PRC surveillance state would project the same beliefs onto Taiwan. That they don't is more than enough to prove your blatant lie completely false.
The fact is that the Chinese surveillance is just factually different than western surveillance and people are acknowledging this as true, to the point where people like you have to lie about racism to emotionally manipulate people because they can't argue their points from reality.
Making up falsehoods out of thin air is bad enough, but next time you do it, you'll save yourself personal embarrassment if the lie is at least somewhat plausible instead of dismissable with a 30-second trip to the internet.
There is always a danger that the ruling class may not stay in power forever, unless the others are nailed to the ground.
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Dead Comment
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online. And apparently Chinese courts even limited facial recognition (no clue how it'll work in practice though). [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-says-facial-recogni...
How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.
It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:
1. https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/chinas-system-of-mass-arbitr...
2. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/china/hong-kong-security-arre...
You can get arrested for "picking quarrels" online:
3. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3146188/pic...
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
This makes it seem like the entire UK is an urban sprawl, evenly monitored, which it isn’t.
In London you’re likely to be on someone’s camera pretty much all the time, much less so in suburbs and smaller towns. There is plenty of countryside, woodland, rural land and villages where there is no CCTV coverage at all.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-t...
That's statistics for London, not the rest of the UK.
I'm confused as to how that isn't also "surveillance".
Being able to know where someone is on your city sure seems like it fits the bill to me, unless you're considering it "enforcement" (and different from surveillance)?
But CCTV doesn’t act as a deterrent like a bobby on the street would. And because there’s a lack of visibility of criminals being caught, it just feels like the police are doing nothing.
If they’re caught down the line it’s unlikely you’d hear about it anyway. The police can’t tell you without it being proven in court unless essentially caught red-handed, and even if proven successfully that could be months or even years away.
Unfortunately, it’s impractical for them to track down your stolen items without investing much more time than the value of those goods (though I would rather they did that than, say, arrest hundreds of peaceful protestors).
This isn’t unique to the UK; my house was raided when I lived in another country and the police attitude was only to record the theft and assume it was gone for good. It really hurts and makes you feel unsafe but I doubt the police force in any major city in any country will spend time looking for stolen goods after a break-in.
(I’m not saying that the surveillance aspect isn’t a very real problem.)
not if the police cant be bothered to investigate. they dont bother with anything non-violent.
Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
If you mean liberty as in Human Rights, it waxes and wanes. Broadly speaking in the EU in the 90s/00s human rights were improved and expanded. The European human rights courts were strengthened, more laws passed aimed at opposing discrimination. And the Human rights act in the UK was codified into law in 1998, for example.
The pendulum is presently swinging the other way, mainly due to a populist revolt against mass migration to Europe. It also doesn't help that mass surveillance has become so cheap and an easy way for politicians to be 'tough on crime'. Plus American tech treats privacy as a revenue model rather than a right, and that bleeds into policy expectations via lobbying.
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
What in the world are you talking about? The US has all of this internally. If on the one narrow point you want to claim that EU has open-borders to the rest of the world, no you don't and that's not something that's good to have anyways. Both US and European citizens are fighting their own governments to decrease immigration as polling shows large opposition to current immigration levels for many years now. A big part of the crackdown on speech in the UK is to restrict criticism of immigration policy.
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[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
The government prioritises order over law, liquidity over solvency and the status of our politicians at international dinner parties.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR.
Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator.
The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.
If true, wouldn't that simply lead to wanted suspects simply avoiding the cameras, meaning innocent people who aren't monitoring these notifications to have their faces and locations captured, while criminals avoid it?
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