Entire City of London set for face scan CCTV
A POLICE force has drawn up plans to scan hundreds of thousands of people’s faces every day with one of the world’s most sophisticated networks of facial recognition cameras.
A report seen by The Mail on Sunday reveals how City of London Police are proposing to have ‘widescale integration’ with privately owned CCTV networks to create a ‘quantum leap’ in surveillance.
The technology identifies faces in a crowd and checks them, without people’s consent, against huge databases containing millions of mugshots of troublemakers or criminals.
The plan to link public and private facial recognition camera networks will create a ‘ring of steel’ around the City, but it has been criticised by campaigners and comes as t he European Commission considers imposing strict limits on the use of the technology.
Its use is governed by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, law, which came into effect in 2018, and bans the collection of sensitive ‘ biometric’ data without citizens’ explicit consent.
Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberties pressure group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘London is already one of the most surveilled cities in the world, beaten only by Beijing.
‘This would make Londoners and our millions of visitors the most monitored in the world.
‘ Facial recognition cameras are automated identity checkpoints that police don’t even have a legal basis to use. London should be a beacon for British freedom, not an Orwellian security zone.
‘The ultimate risk with six million cameras across Britain is that it’s all fed into a unitary, giant database. It would indeed be a quantum leap in centralised mass surveillance.’
Details of the Secure City Programme were revealed by City of London Commissioner Ian Dyson and Assistant Commissioner Alistair Sutherland.
They said the force would ‘invest heavily in technology’ to upgrade the City’s ‘ring of steel’, which was set up in the wake of the IRA’s Bishopsgate truck bomb 26 years ago that killed one person and caused massive damage.
The original ring saw hundreds of automatic number plate recognition cameras installed to monitor every vehicle entering the Square Mile.
In a statement, City of London Police said: ‘The overall aim of the
‘It will be the world’s most monitored city’
programme is to make the City of London the safest city area in the world, using state of the art technology to protect the Square Mile and all of the people in it.’
However, with public criticism mounting, the force said it did not have ‘immediate plans’ to introduce the technology and was monitoring ‘the legal debate’.
Last week, complaints by campaigners over the use of facial recognition at London’s King’s Cross train station prompted the launch of an investigation by the Information Commissioner.