The obvious next step is to prevent entry if the face is covered. I'm curious to know how resistant the system is to face masks with a printed picture on the front (or indeed, the back).
You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
> You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
Again, no, not just "in an investigation".
It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.
Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
It doesn't make it OK if a judge says you have to incriminate yourself or face jail time for not doing so. So either way you're screwed if it gets to that.
Twice I nearly lost my father to terrorism in London. (Sliding Doors commuter moments both times — by sheer chance not being in the very usual place at the very usual time). I remain pretty relaxed about the idea that people who wish to bomb trains and tubes and buses can't get across London without the awareness that they could be tracked.
You cannot live your life paranoid, and while I think the evidence is clear that we need a small readjustment with the security state (as is evidenced by the BBC's extraordinary battle to get them to admit they lied to a court about a neonazi agent) I think it's better to understand that, yes, sometimes people are watching.
Better than the pretence that constitutional rights protect people they clearly do not protect, or that because the CIA or NSA promise not to do something, they aren't doing it.
I don't think there is any benefit in importing the paranoid style of US politics (R. Hofstadter) to the UK. And I think the weird breathless panic Americans have about London is their problem. We, living here, shouldn't choose to imagine it is true, when it isn't. London is safer than every comparable US city and transport policing is a big, big, big part of why. And if freedom-loving Americans have scared themselves too much to visit, I am not sure why we should care.
Where are you getting the perception that Americans generally fear London?
I don't know a single American that has ever expressed any sentiment that London is unsafe. I know a few that have some stupid notions about immigrants in the UK, but that isn't exclusive to people on this side of the pond.
Genuinely, though. Americans just don't worry about safety in London outside of scams and petty crime inherent to any big tourist city.
The drumbeat about "London has fallen", about no-go areas, about sharia law, about violent crime, etc., from American media that we see here is actually pretty much constant.
Given how constant it is, and how it comes from the freedom-fries-nitwit end of the spectrum, and has gone on for a couple of decades now, I tend to assume it has a receptive audience.
I clearly understand that I can personally do nothing about someone wanting to blow me up. If I am on a train with a brown man with a backpack, I do not think it likely he is going to kill me. If it is neat, I think he is going to work. If it is enormous, I think he's probably visiting relatives. If there are wires hanging out of it I think, hey, he hates airpods too. He's just a brown man with a backpack.
I do, however, accept that some brown men with backpacks have blown up tube trains, that the direct causes of that are things I may not even know about, that the risk has not gone away at all, and that indeed at some points the risk may be severe. I can't know which.
But the security services can.
I can decide not to be paranoid about being watched, too.
It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.
I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.
I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.
I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.
Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.
History has taught us that before.
We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. 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.
To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first
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
It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
To continue GP’s point, in Moscow a “database of outstanding wanted suspects” was enough to get a well-known science writer[1] who publicly expressed her opposition to the war systematically harrassed by the police because she (a then-pregnant woman) matched a database record for, I kid you not, a draft evader. Reportedly some of the officers even admitted the absurdity[2] of the situation but, well, computer says detain.
[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.
The thing is, that's the start. But then it will expand. Next it will be tracking and identifying people who went to protests etc.
I don't really want to say never to these kinds of things, when the use is limited. But at the moment there doesn't seem to be any legal limit.
Further, Farage and reform are/were leading in the polls. There's a non zero chance of them getting into power, and the infrastructure is there for them to abuse.
Further, how accurate is this database of outstanding wanted suspects? I ask because I'm currently maybe on bail. Maybe, because there was a gap in between bail sign offs, the wrong person signed that, and I haven't received the latest one, so am I unknowingly supposed to have surrendered myself at the police station, and now risk getting picked up by a camera and getting arrested at the train station?
This is fair, but it feels like it pushes another finger into the door of mass surveillance. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a few toggles away in the station software.
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).
You still have a separate password that authenticates you without biometrics.
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.
No, in the UK they can't just take your finger and press it to your phone or point it at your face to unlock it. They can service you a notice demanding access to your phone, and not providing access is a crime.
In most countries they can. Which is why you should (in a perfect world) have password or fingerprint unlock, and if you use the fingerprint, the phone wipes itself. Not even Graphene supports this.
Yes, but wouldn't the fact that you intentionally set the phone up to wipe itself be enough to charge you for that? You've pretty much made a booby trap for the police.
Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)
---
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?"
Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.
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'.
Self-checkout at the grocery store is a major vector for shoplifting. That's why the cameras are there.
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.
But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face. How does that stop anything other than casual opportunistic theft of low value items by inculcating some kind of pre-crime guilt feeling? Professional shoplifters (if that isn't an oxymoron) have much more subtle means to carry out their trade, or not as the case may be, depending on their target, usually carried out long before they reach any kind of till.
THe one of the face is to ID you, and the one in the barcode area is to work out if you've slapped a sticker for 1kg potatoes on a packet of 1kg of meat.
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.
The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.
I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.
You describe mobile handheld scanners that are a form of self-checkout in some stores, but not the norm. Most of the commenters here probably associate self-checkout with a station with touchscreen, scanner and bagging area.
I only use the mobile handheld scanner version. If someone has to go through all my items and scan them at the terminal, it's not going to be me; store clerks can do that much faster than I can.
Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living, and many things that would improve the standard of living are not done. At some point the argument you have made becomes irrelevant and cliched.
It was implied. Why else would you use that argument in responding to ridgeguy's comment about using human-run checkout lines? What machines would you point to as making the world worse?
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.
You both miss the crux of the argument, i think. It would be more precise to say that physical machines raise the standard of living that we measure, but abstract machines reduce that which we don't measure. (Viz, finance.)
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.
I highly doubt that story as camera footage is audited remotely (the store staff know nothing about it), and half the staff is way too high (to not be detected on the ground).
Not only there are cameras, but the machines typically accept only cards and not cash (except for one supermarket chain in my city) so I never use self-checkout.
The savings that a store has from self checkouts far outweigh the shoplifting it attracts. I don’t see what the cameras add. Do stores review camera footage at the end of the day and then hunt down the offenders?
They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.
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.
Some of it is just the camera, some of it is the camera + scale. The bagging area is a big scale to make sure stuff going in the bagging area was scanned. If the weight goes up without anything being scanned, or with the wrong weight, it will raise the alarm.
I’ve run into a couple situations where I was buying something light, like a greeting card, and the scale didn’t pick it up and was preventing me from moving on… waiting for me to bag the item. I threw my keys on the platform and that signaled I bagged the item and let me move on.
Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.
I know this is the standard response, but it doesn't make sense. If you're going to steal something, why would you expose it at the checkout? Wouldn't you just not bring it out at that point? It's the same for the really annoying scales that some supermarkets insist on that weigh every item you as you pack it, which makes packing really hard.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I think the idea is that you'll go to the check out with several items and only present some of them and then skip the one that is expensive. If you just walk out of the store several times with items you haven't paid for, they might catch and ban you immediately.
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.
My local coop (I will not share the articles, because doxing) caught someone trying to smuggle >£300 of stuff out of the store. its a tiny store, maybe medium cornershop sized.
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.
Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.
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
No, it's metric. Our schools are flooded with 30cm rulers. You'll see kids as young as 8 with 330ml drinks. Some even count in decimal - there is no end in sight
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...
Yes, but as I said it is possible to use a separate ID for entry and exit, so unless they were willing to perform a CCTV trawl then your entire journey could not be assessed. The penalty for this kind of anonymity is paying top fare for entry and exit, so only a very rich tube user could bear the cost. The thing that got people to use Oyster in the first place was 'discounted' prices, as in they bumped the price for a paper ticket when Oyster cards were introduced and kept the old prices for Oyster only journeys. Make of that what you will. Paper tickets are still available as of 2026 last time I checked.
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.
IIRC the big push to contactless and Oyster before it is just reducing the cost of handling money. Transit agencies do not really want to be in the business of banking, and physically printing paper tickets and maintaining the machines to accept them properly is a lot more expensive than an RFID reader.
In particular for paper and magnetic strip, you have to keep the reader clean enough to accept reads properly, and the machine also needs to not damage the ticket. This is a non issue with tapping.
I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.
Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.
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.
You only need 3-5 fps SD video and with motion sensing you only record when there is a customer at the self-checkout. Technically, it is absolutely doable.
About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.
Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.
Which is again, a fair question with a reasonable answer:
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.
Primary theft at them is where you scan N cheap items and just bag Y expensive item without scan and walk out, plausible deniability/psychology at play, a lot less deniability if you shove a whisky bottle down your trousers.
In Spanish supermarkets, it's tins of shellfish in the anti-theft boxes. In English ones, it's razor blades and menstrual pads. Spirits are often tagged in both countries, but not as consistently as the mejillones and the tampons.
And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.
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.
It's strange to me that in your bubble you think the police in the UK are mainly there to hassle the "Palestine" protestors and interrupt their peaceful "From the river to the sea" chants.
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.
> out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
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?
I think it's even worse than that. If at some remote possibility that a criminal does get caught and charged with a crime, the prisons are full (37% foreign criminals [0]) so they won't do any prison time, and therefore no justice is served. In fact our prisons are so full, violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term [1].
> violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term
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.
It's incorrect at a minimum. Reading the source provided:
>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:
It's isolated and out of context, at the very least it needs an indication of the proportion of foreign born people in London, a major city with a large international population.
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.
More incorrect than relevant - I suspect you parsed the wrong line.
I'm seeing:
At the end of the first quarter of 2024, there were 87,869 prisoners in England and Wales.
and:
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
The math checks out: 10,422 / 87,869 x 100 = 11.86%
It's called anarchy-tyranny, where the government fails to enforce basic laws and keep people safe from real criminals (anarchy), but instead uses its power to tightly control, tax, and punish ordinary, law-abiding citizens (tyranny). There are various conspiratorial theories for why this happens but I think the simplest explanation is that an ineffective government cannot deal with criminals and goes after the easier and more compliant targets instead.
"Anarchy" in that phrase is fucking wrong. Unsophisticated people assume that anarchy means "no rules", which is false. It means no rulers, not no rules. (More precisely, it means no non-rulers.)
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.
That's a calumny. Anarchy is not what you end up with when government becomes febrile and vapid - that would be warlordism.
I'll give you a gold star for deconstructing the word roots, but "anarchy" is a term of art.
The salient distinction is that society hasn't abolished rulers - it has merely replaced political rulers with corporate rulers.
Actual anarchy is hard fucking work. It's sustainable in small communities, but you have to sit through meetings where idiots ramble about some stupid shit that is important only to them. It is a prosocial form of government predicated on empowered consensus - which is to say, predicated on bickering. This requires far more from participants than warlordism, where all you have to do is obey the one with the biggest stick.
Anarchy devolves into shittier systems if the community fails to maintain it. It's a high-energy state. Warlordism doesn't devolve; it's the lowest-energy state. Government by primate dominance.
Letting Google and Facebook run your society is not anarchy, it's techno-warlordism. "Techno-feudalism" is less accurate, but broadly understood.
Yes. Anacho-tyranny sounds very conspiratorial, but if you think from the police perspective, it is 1000X times easier to enforce fines and codes on the middle class and shopkeepers then it is to arrest criminals. Having an effective police force means cracking that motivation problem, and it's a sign of a well-aligned and well-functioning society. We aren't one.
You can probably thank Thatcher and the cabal of idiots dumber than lettuce that is the Tory party. Squeeze the poor, squeeze the state budget that even the police force is under-resourced, give the money to their buddies.
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".
Correct. It's another thing that's hard to come to terms with - I know that statistically robberies, theft and violent crimes are going down. But I also know several people who had their garages broken into and their bikes and cars stolen. And in every one of these cases, the police won't even show up to look at the damage, take fingerprints, literally nothing - it's just "here's a case number, contact your insurer, we'll call you back if we ever find anything". In fact I know one guy in Manchester who had his Range Rover stolen, then found it in a supermarket car park 2 days later. Rang the police and they were literally like "well, if you have the keys then just....take it back". And he was like "wait, you don't want to come over, check it for fingerprints, drugs, any trace of anything that would help you find the criminals?". And they basically said no, they have no officers available, so just take the car and tell your insurer the case is closed and you got the car back, that's it.
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.
That has been the trend for decades in lots of other developed countries as well. It doesn't have to be in any way because of increased means of surveillance.
Are you one of those people who think riding an electric motorcycle across our parks and on cycling paths is completely fine and just kids messing about? Or did you just miss that part of my comment?
....are you ok? That's an insane comparison to be making in this situation. Unless I don't know, you're from a country that doesn't value social cohesion?
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.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
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.
>We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. 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.
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.
> anonymous travel... died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.
You can buy an Oyster card with cash and top it up with cash from machines at almost every station.
It's still possible to travel somewhat anonymously this way.
You can still use paper tickets if you're worried about your Oyster card being de-anonymised. But as you say, that is not the primary way of travel anymore.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
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.
Makes me wonder, does anyone know of any countries with high living standards that do not have extensive surveillance? I live in Norway, and I assume I’m already being tracked in a lot of ways. Where would I move to, if I came to the point where I felt the downsides of surveillance was beyond the value of staying in the country?
It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
Exactly. Exasperating how many people are not only oblivious to this, they seem to actively buy in to the status where the government are our masters. They're not, they are literally our employees. We elect them to do what we want.
But the state feels so far removed from this in practice now. I'm probably just more aware of it as I get older, but all the recent changes just show how little power people actually have. In theory, we could elect a government who undoes all the current institutionalised state power over people, and move to a more representative system, but in practice it is extremely difficult to impossible.
I wouldn't mind this so much if the state wasn't so utterly useless at actually wielding this power. I look at a place like Singapore, and I see how most people not actually living in Singapore speak down about the supposed conditions Singaporeans must accept. And yet, as every state approaches this level of authoritarian, one thing you can say, at Singapore is actually good at being authoritarian. Stuff works. The plan is long, and works.
I wrote in another comment but basically yes. Also they can focus on other cases that require physical presence. No need to patrol the entire subway, put 100 police officers to just patrol, every station when you can have 2-3 guys watch the cameras and just 2-3 patrols ready for intervention.
Because it’s hard to investigate that with old cctv tech. Unless the person on the video was easily identifiable, it’s hard to do anything to follow up. With the new networked AI tech you could search for the person across the whole network to find out where they went / get a better view of them.
Documenting birth is legally required since the 1800s and gets sent to a national index. The state will have a name associated with them since birth making them unable to be anonymous.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state
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.
Frankly this is the least of the problems we have.
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.
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.
That does not at all suggest that UK ISPs proactively share anything with the state.
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 think your understanding of 'proactively' might just be different from parent's (and mine).
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.
Let's not get all Humpty Dumpty here. "Upon request" is reactive by definition. "Proactive" sharing would quite literally mean sharing on one's own initiative.
It's proactive in the sense that it's shared before a valid warrant is issued for the information, and before they have any reason to do so. But is reactive to any request at all, sure.
I personally blame all Brits since it's they who allowed their government to pass laws like the Online Safety Act and RIPA Part 2 without so much as a whimper, let alone protest.
In other countries government buildings would've been set on fire.
Man that Apple Watch strap is GORGEOUS. And an Apple Watch app is a great idea for this!
But I just can’t bring myself to try out ANOTHER meeting notetaker app. The space just feels so commoditised. How different will this be to Fireflies? Or the six dozen others?
Getting that strap would absolutely work as a bribe though. I love it…
I find it really interesting that SWEs think this is a good essay. As an experienced marketer, I really disagree. It’s stupid.
The barriers to entry / “respect” angle is a weird one to go in. Obviously people will think they can do marketing if the main, qualified activity you use as an example is… /choosing colours on a landing page/. Marketers have way more important, difficult and “high-barrier-to-entry” tasks to do in order to succeed - and this suggests Tereza is totally unaware of them.
So is she trying to say that software engineers are being treated by the market like marketers?
“Writers, designers, and marketers all have wider pay distributions because the barrier to entry is low and the work is visible: anyone can try, everyone has an opinion, and only the proven best command a premium.” My sweet summer child, have you ever MET a software engineer? What the fuck do you think they do!?
Her paradox of choice implies that she’s ACTUALLY talking about software /companies/… but none of this is new information. Marketers are trained in positioning, segmentation and “finding the fit” - she doesn’t even make a point here!
The middle class of software won’t disappear. Again, she’s equating SaaS to be “all software” (as a marketer she should know better).
And finally, the most critical and undeniable evidence that Tereza is by NO means the “very decent marketer” she calls herself… “Sell services, not software”.
What? Functionally and positionally they are identical. One sells OUTCOMES. It doesn’t matter, as a marketer, whether your product is a service or a software. The product is just ONE of the 4Ps we’re trained to think about when making tactical decisions. Let alone strategic ones.
I’d really strong encourage anybody reading this interested in marketing to read a bit of Mark Ritson. This is the most irritating essay I’ve read in months.
They might not easily be able to cash out, but they often have more options than people realise.
VCs will sometimes invest ‘convertible notes’ which start as debt and “convert” into equity in favourable scenarios.
‘Swamp’ and ‘drag’ clauses are also commmon: if a management team/CEO doesn’t meet their goals as set by the board (like give investors a meaningful exit) then investors can take over and replace that team, or force a sale.
Illiquid private equity in an early stage business, especially one that isnt growing, is hard to get rid of. That’s why investors derisk with terms that massively favour them at the expense of the business they invest in.
In our case, the VC's merged us with our biggest competitor and then sold that to a PE fund. Nothing we could do about it. I took voluntary redundancy and got out asap.
Allow me to suggest a form where people can leave their email to get updates or a newsletter from you! Brevio is the kind of thing that a lot of people look for, and value. The fact you're not charging and it all runs locally earns you a lot of trust and goodwill.
I'm not suggesting monetising your audience or starting a substack, but you never know when having a list of people who are interested in the things you build could come in handy.
I wouldn't even think you'd need to send a confirmation email: just leave it there and see who fills it in.
Realistically, almost 1/4 of the world don’t live in a democracy. And probably another 1/4 of the world doesn’t live in a functioning democracy. By your logic, does that mean half of the global population actually ARE at risk of AI laying waste to almost all employment?
I am by no means an AI doomer, and I use frontier models to a great extent every day as part of my job…
But those at the top of the corporate food chain, those who own and profit from the AI companies themselves, will reap the rewards of this technology.
Maybe there won’t be a dramatic elimination of jobs. But even if there isn’t, the overwhelming majority of the “value” will be going to the 1% and the working class will benefit not.
Heads they win, tails we lose.
AI will not meaningfully improve the standard of living or the quality of life of the everyman. But it will funnel even more of his share of the profit from his work to his corporate paymasters.
Previously we had strikes, powerful unions and even revolutions. There will be none of that this time round.
It’s especially disappointing when the entire system is foiled by the balaclavas worn by so many of the country’s criminals every day anyway.