What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?
The cameras are there to discourage crime and for use in court as evidence. Solving a crime still requires time and energy. Policing is a resources game.
So of course petty crimes are still going to be committed because it’s resource intensive to have someone monitor all the cameras. That is until it isn’t and you have a backlog of video footage of crimes and AI powerful enough to detect crimes being committed in real time. Even then though police work is still required if AI isn't using face or gait detection and/or these systems aren’t hooked up to a database that has linked identifiers to real people. But even those can be defeated with a bally and a limp.
*has already turned into a dystopian hell hole FTFY
At least China has more good weather
Something that’s changing with computer video and AI powered video search tools. I’m very in two minds about it. Being able to solve bike thefts would be great, but a lot of evil could come from a system that actually can monitor and sort through all this video.
What you need is something like being able to search all of the cameras from a wide area which contain a bike and x color hoodie so you can follow the person back to some other location that identifies them further. This is the part that's missing in most cities. It could be done manually, and it would be if it was a very serious crime like terrorism, but for normal theft it isn't worth the time. The tech does exist now though.
Are we talking about flock cameras and the disapparence of Nancy Guthrie?
Your comment is right minded but miss-guided.
You are right to insist on privacy but you failed to note that your neighbours are not twitching their curtains beyond noting your cat is crapping on their veg. To be fair, they probably are but those door cams are probably available in forn parts, way beyond Gladys at no 9's wildest dreams.
I'm old enough to remember Badgers flying across the UK! Those are fucking huge Russian four engined plodders, wheezing across at high altitude in an attempt to cow us into ... some sort of submission. Invariably a flight of Phantoms or Starfighters would whizz on up. In the good old days we'd strap a decent chap onto a firework called a Lightning. I did see a pair do that job - spectacular and I'm sure the pilots probably ended up swallowing their teeth.
Russia does steam punk in some bloody odd ways.
Anyway, I would avoid worrying about our state watching you and worry about other states instead.
The cards seem to accept cash
> But that's within a legal system designed by an elected parliament.
Ah well if it's an elected government then the risk of it turning hostile to its people is zero, of course!
And ask "did that risk materialize?" to the people in China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Belarus, or Germany [1], or USA [2]. There are countless examples of the dangers of surveillance, in the present and in history - you don't need a specific example of exactly Oyster cards being used, to know they are a danger.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/german...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-administration-argues-it-ca...
Even if the people who are putting all of this surveillance in place genuinely do want to do good, the surveillance will still be in place if someone less scrupulous gains power
Let's have a look at Tommy Robinson's Wikipedia article*:
> Robinson has a history of criminal convictions,[5] including for crimes such as assault,[6] threats,[7] harassment,[8] and fraud,[5] as well as contempt of court rulings relating to his videos, and has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025. In June 2022, Robinson said that he lost £100,000 in gambling before declaring bankruptcy in March 2021. He also said he owed an estimated £160,000 to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In August 2024, The Times said that he owed in the region of £2 million to his creditors, and was the subject of a HMRC investigation over unpaid taxes.
The Metropolitan Police are (justifiably) expecting this protest to turn into a violent riot, and have planned accordingly. British police forces have a long-established procedure for collecting CCTV evidence during riots, and then using that to prosecute rioters afterwards.
Robinson has organised 4 London rallies in recent years and this is the second Unite The Kingdom rally. So what makes you think this will be the one which turns violent?
It's basically families listening to speakers on a stage.
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said officers had "policed without fear or favour", knowing it would be challenging.
"There is no doubt that many came to exercise their lawful right to protest, but there were many who came intent on violence."
Assistant Commissioner Twist said officers had suffered broken teeth, concussion, a prolapsed disc, a head injury and a possible broken nose.
For a society striking a British balance between security and privacy, I'd say it's fair to require people with violent convictions to (a) register public protests they plan to attend and (b) consent to facial-recognition surveillance in public. (One could hash, locally store and potentially hardware enforce the restriction on the device level.)
That doesn't mean I think it's okay for everyone around him to have to give up those rights. And I wouldn't support even that in America unless the individual is on probation.
There's a reason you choose to do this during a political protest.
Also, you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts for some reason? Do you think that they are justified because he, and the people who join him, will be publicly avoiding taxes and bookies?
edit: It's also important to note that in the 15th year of future Reform rule, when a "reformed" Tommy Robinson is appointed Home Secretary, he will entirely support drones doing facial recognition during protests. How else are you supposed to catch the anti-Semites?
Sure. But this isn't an absolute right. To be trivial, you don't have the right to do fraud in public without being recorded by the police.
I'm saying for a convicted violent criminal, particularly one with a history of inciting violence, I think there is a place where a reasonable line could exist.
> you included a bunch of gambling and tax debts
Where did I do this?
https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...
A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
> A 36-year-old woman who had been unlawfully at large for more than 20 years and was wanted for failing to appeal at court for an assault in 2004.
> A 31-year-old man who was wanted for voyeurism for more than six months.
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
> 37 arrests for breaches of court‑imposed conditions
> Darame was found to be in breach of tag conditions, in relation to an intentional strangulation and two counts of assault on an emergency worker on Monday, 8 September 2025 and arrested.
> Kastriot Krrashi, 35, of Dingwall Road, Croydon, was stopped by officers for being wanted on suspicion of breaching his conditions as a registered sex offender.
> Neville Cohen, 55 (25.05.1970) of no fixed address, was stopped by officers for being wanted for failing to comply with a condition on a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) which required him to attend Croydon Police Station in October 2025.
These are all pretty low-hanging fruit. Most of these are misdemeanors. None rise to the level of murder. None are "persons of interest." This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans. Great job, UK-- fish are quite easy to catch once you've tagged them.
The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement. He went on to commit the deadliest terrorist attack in British history: 22 dead, 1000+ injured. The cameras would not have done anything everyone in a position to intervene refused to do. He wasn't a wanted criminal until after he was vaporized by his own bomb.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, if you let the state become this efficient at catching people for offenses are minor as "failure to appear," god help you if you ever turn whistleblower. They'll spend every resource tracking you down, but that stranger you were talking to before your "suicide" will never be found. No public or private agency should have this much power.
> The ISIS-linked kid that bombed Manchester Arena was known to every intelligence agency and was even physically stopped by venue security before being released due to concerns about racism in enforcement.
The bureaucratic solution to situations like the Arena bombing is to remove human judgment and replace it with 4k video analytics. The technology already exists. I don't like it either but if there is ever a way to remove decision making power from a person by means of technology or process, the bureaucracy will gleefully use it.
That's a very poor read. Most of these look like breaches of previous conviction release terms. Failure to appear isn't a non-issue. It's a bail skip to dodge a conviction.
I'll agree they're not fresh murders, but if you don't enforce the terms of a release on licence, it makes it a joke, and more importantly puts the public at risk.
> A 41-year-old man who was wanted for rape in relation to an incident which took place in November in Croydon.
>> These are all pretty low-hanging fruit.
>> This is literally the "overpolicing" of petty crime critical race theory bemoans.
You listed voyeurism and RAPE. I'll take one less rapist on the streets thank you very much.
Somehow I don't think Tommy Robinson would take such an approach to say the classification of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization by the UK government though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Action#Proscription_...
The implication of police state is that they care about crime, but they do not care about crime. Anyone can turn up in Britain, claim asylum and will be sent to a hotel closed down for their comfort. Many visas were denied for speakers at this protest.
It is a politician state, not a police state. Facial recognition is being deployed against political opponents, not criminals.
I mean its not. Plus with the court backlogs rising, the chances of you getting convicted are rapidly diminishing
Well, I guess they'll have to raise the custody time limits to something more reasonable then, like a year or so. I mean, as long as you get a trial eventually, this is fine, right?
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo.
I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit.
However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.
Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers.
Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation.
One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.
Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common.
They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects.
By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
Must be the heinous crime thing tho.
Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.
I won't hold my breath for them to do something like this given the record of 'two-tier justice' in the UK, a record which launched people like 'Tommy Robinson' (a pseudonym hence the quotes) into the spotlight and which may well be the final push 'Reform' needs to become 'first past the goal posts' in the next election. For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.
The Palestine Action demos are far easier to police, because its a proscribed group, anyone expressing support for them are instantly nicked. Hence why there are something like >2000 arrests.
Now one could argue that this is an affront to freedom of speech, but given the way you've written this I suspect that you might not agree with me.
> 'two-tier justice' in the UK, a record which launched people like 'Tommy Robinson' (a pseudonym hence the quotes) into the spotlight
I would strongly contest that the justice system launched him. Given that he founded the EDL, and spent most of the time headbutting people, I would say he's famous because of the work he put in, to be famous.
Side note: its the Met, not london police, and the police are distinct and separate from the courts
Genuine question: has there been physical violence (against people, not property) at their protests in the UK?
One of the affiliated groups in the pro-Palestine demo is funded by a group which provides the majority of funding to the Labour party...so there is that.