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London has become the test case for how democracies will use facial recognition software. The police

hope it can be used to solve and prevent violent crime, but can citizens ever give their informed consent?

By Madhumita Murgia

new legislation to cover facial images,

because the technology is developing

apace and the police are already explor-

ing it,” says Paul Wiles, the UK’s inde-

pendently appointed biometrics com-

missioner. “Biometrics is emerging in

both the public and private sector, and

the important question is who will share

what with whom, and who decides.”

Mr Fussey, from the University of

Essex, agrees, saying the current laws

around facial recognition were “com-

pletely inadequate”.

“Parliament is so choked up with

Brexit there is no appetite for law

changes, but there isn’t a legal basis.

You’re asking police to trial it to keep the

public safe, but with no national leader-

ship or guidance. It is unfair on the pub-

lic and on the police.”

MPs on the House of Commons

science and technology committee last

week urged the Home Office to impose a

moratorium on all facial recognition

trials until regulations can be estab-

lished. The call has been backed by

independent experts including AI

researchers at the Ada Lovelace

Institute; the biometrics commissioner;

and the UK’s data protection authority,

which said the use of facial recognition

in public spaces represented “a real step

change in the way law-abiding people

are monitored as they go about their

daily lives”.

However, the police believe the poten-

tial benefits are significant. “Live facial

recognition technology has the poten-

tial to help our officers locate criminals

who are wanted for serious and violent

offences, such as knife and gun crime,

and the sexual exploitation of children,”

said deputy assistant commissioner

Duncan Ball of the Met Police.

“The public would expect the Met

Police to use all available and propor-

tionate means to catch violent offenders

and it is right that we trial emerging

technology that could help us to do so.”

Before the end of the year, the Welsh

courts will deliver a judgment on the

case brought by Ed Bridges against the

South Wales Police for scanning his own

face twice, including during a protest

against the Cardiff Arms Fair.

The judgment will set a historic legal

precedent for the UK’s use of facial rec-

ognition. In his crowdfunding appeal for

the case, Mr Bridges laid out his view of

the high stakes.“The inevitable result is

that people will change their behaviour

and feel scared to protest or express

themselves freely — in short, we’ll be

less free.”

O

n the last day of January,

few of the shoppers and

office workers who hur-

ried through Romford

town centre in east

London, scarves pulled tight against the

chill, realised they were guinea pigs ina

police experiment.

The officers sitting inside a parked

van nearby were watching them on

screens, using a new technology that the

police hope will radically reduce crime

in London — live facial recognition.

Cameras stationed near Romford train

station picked up every face walking

past, and matched it to a police watch-

list of wanted criminals. Successful

matches would result in immediate

arrest.

For all the potential to fight crime,

however, the trial quickly stumbled into

the thorny issues that surround the

technology. A bearded man in a blue

baseball cap approached the surveilled

area, with his grey jumper pulled up to

cover his face. He had just been

informed by a bystander that the police

were testing facial recognition in the

area and did not want to participate.

The police demanded that he comply

and scanned his face with a facial recog-

nition tool on a mobile phone. Although

his face did not match that of any known

criminals, a verbal altercation ensued,

which resulted in the man being fined

£90for telling an officer to “piss off”.

The entire incident was caught on cam-

era by journalists.

“The fact that he’s walked past clearly

masking his face from recognition.It

gives us grounds to stop him,” an officer

says, defending his actions.

Cameras in the capital

The incident — one of fourarrests of

people avoiding the cameras in Rom-

ford that day — is one of the reasons that

live facial recognitionis causing such

acute concern amongobservers and

civil rights activists. Given that the tech-

nology is such an overt form of surveil-

lance, many believe that explicitcon-

sentof citizens is fundamental — some-

thing the Romford man never gave.

“When people get stopped and

searched in the street, or fined for avoid-

ing cameras, when they don’t consent to

being observed by cameras, that is a

problem,” says Peter Fussey, a criminol-

ogist at the University of Essex who was

present in Romford, asan independent

police-appointed monitor.

“The most important thing in

research ethics, above all else is.. .to

be absolutely sure people consent to

being part of that research ... Yet what

happened in these trials is that if people

did not engage with it, police would

intervene, stop them and search them.”

London is now at the forefront of a

battle over the use of facial recognition

by the authorities that is escalating

across many democratic countries. As

the technology has become commer-

cially available in recent years, via com-

panies such asAppleand Facebook, the

biggest uptake has been in countries

with authoritarian political systems —

most notablyin China, which uses facial

recognition as part of its extensive and

highly intrusive surveillanceof Muslim

Uighurs in Xinjiang province.

As police departments in democratic

estimated 420,000 CCTV cameras oper-

ate in and around the city, making it the

second-most monitored city in the

world after Beijing, with its 470,

cameras, according to a report by the

Brookings Institution. (Washington DC,

in third place, has just 30,000).

Many were put in place in the early

1990s in response to IRA bombings in

the city, followed by waves of installa-

tions after the September 11 and Lon-

don Underground terrorist attacks, and

the 2012 Olympics.

For years, the cameras dotted around

the city were “dumb” devices, peep-

holes that did not know what they were

looking at. However, advances in artifi-

cial intelligence, along with the drop-

ping cost of the cameras themselves,

have transformed the business of visual

surveillance. Machine learning algo-

rithms trained to recognise specific peo-

ple, objects or strange behaviours have

supercharged these cameras, allowing

them to effectively “see”.

Over the next five years, the number

of so-called smart cameras in public and

private spaces, from schools to hospi-

tals, is expected to increase exponen-

tially across London, according toa

reportby Tony Porter, the UK’s surveil-

lance camera commissioner. They will

create a smart city that will itself

become the eyes and ears of an overbur-

dened law enforcement system.

“AI... could analyse thousands of

video-feeds to track and alert authori-

ties of anomalies,” writes Esther Colwill,

Accenture’s global lead on media and

technology, along with a team of col-

leagues in a report on AI surveillance.

“If enabled, cities could crowdsource

commercial and residential security

system data... to get a real-time pic-

ture of potential criminal activity.”

Elements of this future are already

being used by public bodies in London.

Transport for London has used AI to

analyse footage from cameras in areas

such as Liverpool Street and Mile End,

to spot unusual behaviours such as lin-

gering pedestrians or suspicious bag-

gage. Local councils, such as Newham,

have trialled smart CCTV that sends

automatic alerts to officials about

events such as crowd build-up or suspi-

cious objects.

In NHS hospitals, millions of patients

are exposed to “ever increasing surveil-

lance technology from drones and body-

worn video to automated facial recogni-

tion”, Mr Porter said in the January

report.

Smart CCTV is also being pioneered

by the private sector. Convenience

stores such as Budgens, and supermar-

kets including Tesco,Sainsbury’sand

Marks and Spencerall have cameras

that are already, or soon to be, capable of

facial recognition, used for applications

ranging from crime prevention to esti-

mating the age of those buying alcohol

or cigarettes.

Yoti, a British technology start-up, is

rolling out its facial analysis software in

over 25,000 convenience stores in the

next four months to estimate the age of

customers; while another London

start-up, Facewatch, says its software,

which can recognise known criminals,

has been trialled by a number of high-

street retailers in the past two years, and

will soon be included in 550 stores

across London.

Facewatchhas been in talks to sign

data-sharing deals with the Metropoli-

tan Police and the City of London Police.

Shaun Moore, chief executive of

US-based facial recognition company

Trueface.aim, which provides its tech-

nology to UK casinos, says London is an

advanced market. “The cameras are

already there and have been there for

decades. They were put in for safety and

security, so there was never a big uproar

about it,” he says.

Like Facewatchand Yoti,Trueface

does not manufacture cameras, but pro-

vides its software to businesses looking

to upgrade existing CCTV. The company

is “putting our solution on existing

infrastructure”, explains Mr Moore.

Public versus private

Increasingly, the lines are blurring

between the use of facial recognition

technology by private firms and the

public sector. Surveillance camera sys-

tems in public places are operated by

the private sector, who give law enforce-

ment free access to their footage.

The police’s own facial recognition

systems are built by commercial organi-

sations, which can raise other issues.

Japanese technology company NECpro-

vides cameras to the Metropolitan and

South Wales Police.

Hannah Couchman at Liberty, a non-

profit organisation that is supporting

the case against the South Wales Police,

says that any examination of the tech-

nology requires access to training data

and algorithms, but the company sees

that information as a trade secret. “That

overlap between government and pri-

vate companies leads to a lack of trans-

parency that is inevitable,” she says.

NEC declined to comment.

Some experts believe the close collab-

oration between public and private sec-

tors is a growing problem because there

is currently no ethical or regulatory

framework for private use of surveil-

lance technologies.

“All these companies have customers

but they can’t share who their clients

are,” said Stephanie Hare, a campaigner

and researcher. “The private sector is

where we have the greatest ignorance.

We have no data about how companies

are using it, nobody has oversight, it’s a

total free for all.”

One reason for the legal vacuum is

that UK laws governing the use of bio-

metrics, including our facial data, have

not been updated since 2012, and focus

primarily on DNA and fingerprints.

“I think it’s quite urgent that we enact

countries begin to investigate the tech-

nology, London has become one of the

main test grounds because of the large

network of CCTV cameras that already

operate in the city. The Romford opera-

tion was one of 10 such events around

London carried out by the Met police

over a period of three years, including

twice at the Notting Hill Carnival.

Over the course of the trials, police

planned to gather evidence about the

accuracy and bias of the system and to

assess whether the use of the dragnet

technology could be justified by its

potential benefits — preventing or solv-

ing major acts of violent crime.

The use of face recognition by two

forces — London’s Metropolitan Police

and the South Wales force — has

sparked a national debate about where

people will draw the line to protect their

right to privacy. The discussion centres

on whether there is any legal basis to use

live facial-recognition on the general

population, and whether blanket use of

the technology fundamentally under-

mines the rights of citizens. It comes on

the heels of US cities, such as San Fran-

cisco and Oakland, choosing to tempo-

rarily ban facial recognition use by pub-

lic bodies until regulations are in place.

Many of these issues could come to a

head in a legal case in the UK. In May, Ed

Bridges,who lives in Cardiff, the Welsh

capital, brought one of the first legal

challenges to police use of facial recogni-

tion on the grounds that it is a breach of

the Human Rights Act 1998. The out-

come of the case could set a precedent

around the world, from the US to India

and Australia, where facial recognition

is being quietly tested.

“We are not aware of anywhere live

facial recognition is being used for gen-

eral public surveillance, except in

China,” says Silkie Carlo, executive

director of Big Brother Watch, a civil

rights campaign organisation that has

brought a separate legal challenge

against the Met Police’s use of the tech-

nology in London.

“It’s really alarming for Britain to go

down this path and set this precedent

not only for other democracies, but cer-

tainly for less liberal states. It’s being

used to track ethnic minorities in China;

the possibilities are chilling.”

London is an obvious test bed for

visual surveillance technologies. An

Public spacesLondon has 420,

CCTV cameras, some of which the

police want to use for facial recognition

Legal vacuumExperiments with the

technology are taking place despite

the absence of clear regulations

Global exampleThe decisions London

takes about facial recognition will set

an example for other democracies

Dragnet surveillance

Ed Bridges,

below, has

brought a

lawsuit over the

use of facial

recognition by

police. London’s

extensive

network of

security

cameras was

partly a

response to the

IRA, which

bombed

Manchester in

1996, right— PA

‘Parliament is

so choked up

with Brexit

there is no

appetite for

law changes.

You are

asking the

police to trial

it with no

leadership or

guidance’

‘AI could

analyse

thousands of

video-feeds

to track and

alert

authorities of

anomalies...

to get a real-

time picture

of potential

criminal

activity’

London is a test bed for visual

surveillance technologies

Source: Brookings

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London

Washington DC

Beijing

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