There's been badly thought out legislation, but drawing the conclusion that
"Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society."
Is wrong.
Historically when it comes to sh*tty regimes there is no such thing as "robust restrictions". At best whatever exists before is a minor inconvenience that can be worked around by ignoring, packing the judiciary, intimidation, or changing the law.
At worst the "robust restrictions" hobble the ability of previous reasonable regimes to operate effectively, thereby increasing their chances of being accused of being soft on crime/immigration and ending up with sh*tty regimes led by so called "strongmen".
Ultimately, no amount of rights or technical restrictions is protection from overreach. The only protection is far harder, and it is to work at developing political systems that bring people together and avoid giving the extremists the opportunity to take power in the first place.
the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then
in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete
[1] Asya Kazantseva
[2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.
On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.
On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.
To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Kinda, it's domain-name level, which is again an illustration of the lack of understanding the government has; they were even told this during the public comment phase of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, how their own example of "perhaps a teen goes missing and we can see they went on twitter and look on their account" has the reality of "no you idiots [I'm paraphrasing], their phone is constantly talking to twitter regardless of if they're using it or not, or even still alive or not".
On the other hand, those records are worse than being shared with the state, they can be read at any time by a long list of state entities without anyone even needing a warrant. The Welsh Ambulance service being able to do this without needing warrant is one of the big parts of why I left the UK (the other being Brexit, of course).
Just want to add, the overhead cameras at checkout are pointed straight down and can read your phone password as you put it in to pull up Apple Pay.
It's like a stranger looking over your shoulder, and you can't even tell it to bounce.
The touch + passcode is nice because even if someone watches you enter your passcode it won't matter unless they can spoof the fingerprint reader too, which is highly unlikely. And you can use a much shorter passcode for convenience.
I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference.
Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...
Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.
I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.
I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.
As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.
If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.
Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.
Only the one that's shown on the screen. There are other cameras, including ones in the ceiling that look at the entire machine.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
A likely excuse!!
I did not say "all" machines. If I had meant "all" I would have written "all". That's what the word "all" is for.
Consider: "people like ice cream" Riposte: "not everybody likes ice cream"
I see this kind of response over and over here. It's cliched and irrelevant.
In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."
It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.
Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.
Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.
GDP, measures of inflation: Goodhart's law.
BTW, the cash register was invented because of rampant theft by the cashiers.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
> I don’t see what the cameras add.
Again, stores would not spend money on self-checkouts and cameras if they didn't pay off.
In the Seattle area, the cities are trying to stop grocery stores from shutting down.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
[1] lots of people truly need intervention but America uses therapy to cope with basic shit https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.
They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
The classic combo is Afghan buj + crack but synthetic opioids are starting to make an appearance now the CIA isn’t producing heroin anymore.
It’s nowhere near as bad as the west coast of the US obviously, that’s a whole other level.
I would normally use a different word than crackhead but I thought I’d use the internationally recognised term
there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
Here's a good reference point: if you have one hard drive per camera, and record at 1Mbps, you can store 5 years of footage.
Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.
Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.
However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.
Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways.
When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.
Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking.
> Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.
Roads are owned by the people. The government (should) be the servants of the interests of the people.
How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?
If you're more likely to be caught due to the surveillance, logic would dictate that it's the greater deterrent.
I would hazard to say that wouldn't have happened had a police officer been stood there instead.
Some major shops in the UK have photographs of police officers on the door, because it reduces theft!
I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
Indeed, this is not the case in the UK. Its too fucking expensive, and the paper work to approve that is too fucking hard. Most of the time the state will request search logs from google instead. its far cheaper and much higher signal to noise.
Also "intercept" evidence is inadmissible in court, so its not all that useful for convicting people.
Don't get me wrong, the UK like the USA has the ability to do all of this. But its used for specific actions (ie find a bomb-y needle in a haystack) where direct action is required.
AS I said, intercepted evidence won't convict someone here because it can't be used as evidence. so if they see that your messaging someone about planning some attrocity, you'll have to be caught in the act of planning, or a physical device with the messages have to be found.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
Snatched your phone? Sorry mate. But some old lady better not be walking around with a tshirt that says "I support Palestine Action".
I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.
Specifically, think about the reaction you are having based on 1/ your perceived outcomes and 2/ their explanations for it. They seem pretty aligned to me, based on where you are directing your anger. So job well done on their part.
this didnt happen btw
the grooming gangs have largely had white perpetrators and all investigations into the police found that they simply do not listen to women, specially those of working class.
Rotherdam where the big asian men case was found, it lasted 17 years and the police had been investigated twice and failed catastrophically both times. With severe reforms recommended and never implemented. And the fear of being racist had never come up.
The case of the grooming gangs gained attention in 2011. And in 2016 the ex chief of police AFTER being investigated and fired due to gross errors then said that he didnt do more because he was afraid of being called racist.
The subsequent report in 2020 from the conservative goverment had that line too, although it also had copy pasted lines from american far right think tanks.
It seems like a convinient excuse to the fact that the police have shown 0 interest in helping poor people in the country for decades, and have shown misogynistic and racist behaviour in every internal investigation ever done (including the 750 page one done after a cop ra ped and murdered Sarah Everrat)
But I guess decades of internal reviews, consistent problems highlighted and demands for police reform can all be ignored due to the convinient excuse of a fired imbecile who allowed hundreds of girls to be hurt under his watch. There was video evidence, he saw and was brought to a judge and ignored because he thought all girls from council states are basically whores. But I am sure he didnt stop it because the people doing it in his case were pakistani. The grooming gang in scotland that were all white must have been because the cops thought the gang might also be foreign? The school grooming gang in Nottingham which was a catholic school and the priests were just moved, those cops also feared that jesus was pakistani?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
G20 country prison systems that I'm aware of have early release programs, it's almost a requirement to optimise what space there is for those that most deserve prison.
What's at issue with [1] is where, in actual fact, do a couple of teenagers who nicked a quad bike and likely very unintentionally also'd a manslaughter fall on the "violent criminal" spectrum.
You mean those that are the biggest danger to the government as opposed to the biggest danger to regular citizens.
Why is this statistic relevant?
>76,869 British nationals were recorded in the prison population at the end of the first quarter of 2024. The remainder of the population was made up of 10,422 foreign nationals, making up 11.9% of the total population, with an additional 578 having no nationality recorded.
It seems the 37% figure may have come from an entry in the table breaking down those non-British nationalities by country:
>All other nationalities 3,899 37.4%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
At one extreme, if the population of London happened to be almost entirely foreign born then it would seem that UK citizens are working overtime at London crime.
E.g. with North Sea oil: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214768/economics/norway-u...
Norway is rich and socialist. I was there a while ago and their billboards had ads from their national refugee council asking for donations... on the Friday evening there was a march for Palestine in downtown Oslo. Imagine how well that would go down in the UK "society".
They set out to rob the nation's wealth in the late 70s, and they largely succeeded.
A better term would be "warlordism", if you want to emphasise the lawlessness of the financial class, or maybe "feudalism" to emphasise that the financial class and the political class are congruent.
They seem to be attacking non-electric cyclists, for fun. Shades of mods and rockers.
I know the anecdotes don't help - they are just anecdotes. But man, it really doesn't fill me with confidence that I'd be given much help if this happened to me.
No, man, anecdotes are more often than not pure misinformation. You live in a country where car theft has absolutely plummeted in the last 30 years. Look it up, I guarantee it. 100 %. I'm almost certain it's the same for bike theft too.
There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.
I don’t have evidence that shows specific examples of where it happens, but the state apparatus for it to do so exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that it is happening on a daily basis.
What it means is the GDPR doesn't stop ISPs choosing to share when asked, rather than waiting for the warranted request that will come, as long as there is a lawful basis.
Again: I don't really have a problem with that. If you've ever used a website that arranges work for lone workers (freelancers who do site visits, freelance estate agents, models, dog walkers) then you'll presumably want the people who run those communities to feel able to choose to share with law enforcement when asked.
I'd agree that entities that provide their users' data upon a simple request, and a carveout in regulations that allows (not forces) them to do so, fits the definition of proactive.