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British Cops Will Scan Every Fan's Face At the Champions League Final (vice.com)
Using a new facial recognition surveillance system, British police will scan every fan's face at the UEFA Champions League on June 3rd and compare them to a police database of some 500,000 "persons of interest." "According to a government tender issued by South Wales Police, the system will be deployed during the day of the game in Cardiff's main train station, as well as in and around the Principality Stadium situated in the heart of Cardiff's central retail district." From the report: Cameras will potentially be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 visitors plus the many more thousands of people in the vicinity of the bustling Saturday evening city center on match day, June 3. Captured images will then be compared in real time to 500,000 custody images stored in the police information and records management system alerting police to any "persons of interest," according to the tender. The security operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology by London's Metropolitan Police during 2016's Notting Hill Carnival.
The American definition of 'Person of Interest' is someone who has not been formally accused or charged with a crime, which means they don't have enough evidence yet. If you don't have enough to charge a person, you shouldn't have enough to run public facial recognition scans for them.
If you're ready to arrest them on sight, that's enough for me. That's a good standard.
But what about everyone else? Do you really think the cops won't keep every face they capture, for comparison against future images from security cameras? Do you think they won't start analyzing who shows up where and the correlation with criminal activity to create lists of suspects?
They cast this net as far and wide as the technology permits unless and until they're reined in by law. Given enough cameras and enough processing power, they'd gladly follow every citizen all day long, because it'd make their job much easier.
The public needs to decide just how much privacy they're willing to sacrifice in the name of security, and get their legislative representatives to give that decision the force of law... or the cops will take all their privacy without even blinking. Not because they're evil, but because their job is to catch bad guys, not consider the moral and philosophical issues of the tools and methods they use to catch them.
Theresa May passed what Snowden called "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies."
Before this, airports were making 3D models of flyers' faces without their knowledge or permission, and attaching such to their passport records. This happens if you go through the 'inbound' e-passport aisle. I saw this with my own eyes at Bristol Airport before a security guard shouted at me. There is no law against such data collection.
I don't know if you can get a ticket with cash but otherwise you can bet these facial/3D scans will be added to a GCHQ database.
Sometimes the implementation of this kind of measures is a warning sign of such government to come.
About two years before WW 2 broke out, somebody in Dutch government thought it would be a good idea to register all people's religions. Catholics, Protestants and, of course, Jews.
The then under secretary of state (or whatever you call that position) didn't agree and refused. He was forcefully replaced with a more docile one, and the measure was implemented and completed anyway, just before WW 2 broke out.
We now know how this helped the German Nazi's with separating the Jews from the non-Jews and shipping them off to labor camps where they were physically abused, mostly until death followed.
I don't think this was a coincidence, so prepare for what might be coming your way after all cash is gone and the Americans' guns are taken from them.
Probably by a law they all agree with.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.