Police Scanning Every Face At UK Download Festival

AmiMoJo writes: Leicestershire Police have announced that they will be scanning every face at the popular UK Download music festival. The announcement article on Police Oracle (paywalled) reads, "the strategically placed cameras will scan faces at the Download Festival site in Donington before comparing it with a database of custody images from across Europe." The stated goal is to catch mobile phone thieves. Last year only 91 of the 120,000 visitors to the festival were arrested, and it isn't clear if the data will be deleted once checked against the database. The linked article provides at least one image of a costume that would probably trip up any facial recognition technology yet devised.

Comments

They have no choice!

[Anonymous Coward]

The festival needs a license, the last labour government made it condition of the license that the police agree, so the police use it to add any arbitrary law to the agreement.

So here the police demanded mass surveillance as a condition of their approval and so the festival has no choice but to go along with it.

This is how the UK is, the police drive the democracy, its heavily over-policed, and if you try to tackle them, they send out PR people to talk trash on TV.

Re:They have no choice!

[AmiMoJo]

Bingo. Whenever the police have to licence something, e.g. the sale of alcohol or an event, they tag on a load of extra conditions for their own benefit. You will probably find that the CCTV providing the images for facial recognition has been paid for by the festival organizers as part of the deal. Any shop or pub getting a licence these days will need to install CCTV and make it available to the police.

The police love this. It costs them nothing and they can claim that much of the machinery of their oppression is privately owned, and thus not a threat or controlled by the laws governing their behaviour.

you can be everywhere

[Gravis Zero]

so a fun anecdote i heard from a friend who works in the biometrics field is that in testing facial recognition software that would track people on a college campus, they found a strange anomaly that there was one person that had been spotted hundreds of times in multiple locations at the same time. after reviewing the footage he realized that the cameras were actually finding bob marley's face on t-shirts.

download is a shit festival

[amias]

I've been involved in quite a few uk festivals and know several organisers and IMNSHO opinion this could have been rejected by the organisers.

Download has a reputation in the festival scene for being one of the grimmest most corporate of festivals, think mainstream moshing meatheads on speed
and lager , not hugging hippies on ecstasy. Its quite likely the police strong armed download about this because of their target audience but its just as
likely download came up with this themselves to reduce policing bills. Having seen policing bills for other festivals its quite likely download were
hit with something in the order of millions and hired someone (lots of ex-coppers consult on this ) to analyse how to mitigate it and they came up with this.
Note the almost total lack of outcry from festival goers about this, downloaders just don't care, if this was tried with glastonbury there would be riots.

The RFID purchasing thing is way more dangerous in my opinion , this has been tried as several festivals and has resulted in a lot of festival
traders getting ripped off by organisers who simply loot their traders revenue if they fail to make enough money (which happens a lot because
festival running is subject to a bewildering array of regulations that don't make sense and cause unpredictable expenditure). People who work
at festivals know full well that accepting anything that isn't cash is a gamble on the skills of the organisers. It turns festival organisers into banks
which is a terrible idea.

the police strategy of applying more and more over the top requirements on festival organisers is driving festivals into smaller and smaller events,
this is typically because the explosion of festivals is a direct response to similar controlling behaviour regarding events and venues in cities. Its a dangerous game to play , over zealous legislation drives events underground where they are potentially less safe (although often much more sensible), where they generate no tax revenue and have no access to sensible venues. This also dramatically increases the possible harms of drug use , contributes to a lot of post drug use psychosis and creates a vast revenue for criminals.

Until the government and the police recognise and protect the right to have fun and gather socially as the vital part of our culture that it is we will continue to
have all manner of baffeling social problems as people do it anyway in less than safe circumstances.