4 ms·
Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will
by stavros 6mo ago
Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well.
The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?
- hactually 6mo agoMust be some heinous crimes to enable dragnet surveillance. That or the rotten state of Britain really is trying anything from splitting at the seams. Must be the heinous crime thing tho.
- philipallstar 6mo agoIts definitely not heinous crimes. It's just recording people at events to know who's of what political persuasion.
- 4ndrewl 6mo agoOr maybe it's just that whenever Tommy ten names has one of his rallies it ends in violence?
- spwa4 6mo agoEver walked through the streets of London after essentially any rally? They all end in violence.
- asib 6mo agoAre you serious? This is so ignorant it's unbelievable. There are gazillions of marches that have ended without incident.
- 4ndrewl 6mo agoThe sad thing is that GP is not even being paid to spread this tripe. I just can't understand their motivation to post such patently false info based on what...Tiktok research from Russia? At least Farage/Yaxley and their hangers-on are clearly on the make.
- spwa4 6mo agoI mean property destruction, and then it's just true.
- KaiserPro 6mo ago> They all end in violence. Odd way to say you've never been to london.
- baal80spam 6mo agoThought crime, obviously!
- rolph 6mo agofacial recognition is old news, the development of intent prediction is the edge.
- 1shooner 6mo agoI don't personally support this surveillance, but that isn't what the articles says. It says they will be "scanning for suspects from above." And later quotes the Met making reference to 'intelligence'. So conceivably they could have information about the plans of specific individuals at this event.
- stavros 6mo agoRight, but suspects of what? Just in general, all the crimes they know about?
- futter9 6mo ago[flagged]
- suburban_strike 6mo agoIt doesn't matter what the article says. There is no penalty for lying and no incentive to be honest. The media exists to broadcast their lies at scale. Back in the 2000s, upon arrest it was pretty common practice for cops to page through your phone contacts to see who you knew. I don't know if Cellebrite was used back then or if it was manual but the inferences were made and the point was to map out suspects' social networks to find suppliers and upstream orchestrators they had in common. They're doing the same thing here but lying about it. By capturing all faces associated with whatever protest is going on and mapping them to known identities (because everyone has to provide ID to do anything nowadays), they gather intelligence on entire groups of dissidents. The crowd ARE the suspects. By the time you're hearing about it in the news they've already been doing it for years. I wouldn't dare set foot near any anti-Israel rally myself, suspecting the NYPD has been field-testing this for a while and activist NGOs like Canary Mission explicitly performing such recon and mapping themselves. All those DHS counter-terrorism grants weren't spent exclusively on MRAPs and bomb disposal robots. That money trickled down to a lot of interesting places.
- conradludgate 6mo agoIt's worth stating that historically these right-wing culture protests have been a bit more violent in nature than most protests are. I'm not suggesting that everyone in the protest is violent, but there's enough mob mentality that makes me (someone who lives in London) uncomfortable.
- stavros 6mo agoSure, but there's a difference between surveillance after a crime vs before.
- nailer 6mo ago[flagged]
- KaiserPro 6mo ago> Keep is mind the UK left is aligned with Islam The Left has a fascination with Palestine, not islam. People who push the "the left love poltical islam" are usally trying to sell you that London is a wasteland, or that white people can't speak in public
- conradludgate 6mo agoAI enhanced misinformation campaigns working as intended
- KaiserPro 6mo agoI'm sorry I don't understand? are you saying that I'm the one affected by AI propaganda?
- graemep 6mo agoDepends how you interpret "aligned with" and "Islam". They "left" has formed alliances with Islamist extremists so i think the "aligned with" bit is accurate. The "Islam" is inaccurate and conflates Islamism with Islam. Most British Muslims are not extremist nutcases, and there are plenty on the "right" too - numerous Conservatives, some in Reform (e.g. Zia Yusuf), etc.
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agoif protest expects confrontation (for either side reasons), it's possible for roads to be preemptively de-surfaced to get stones to throw at police
- graemep 6mo agoNo, nothing to do with Reform. Organised by Tommy Robinson. The guy Reform think is such a nutcase that they turned down a huge donation from Elon Musk because Elon made it conditional on letting Robinson join Reform. Its hard to find anyone more loathsome than Tommy Robinson in British politics, but being horrible is not a crime.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 6mo agoTo Reforms credit while I do think they started off as a bit of a looney party that relied on theatrics they managed to evolve into a more mature party ever since Zia Yusuf joined and you see how the tone of Nigel Farage has already become more serious. To some that will look like they became "Conservatives 2.0" but I don't think we have another real conservative party left anyway.
- KaiserPro 6mo ago> ever since Zia Yusuf joined The same one that threatening concentration camps in areas that don't vote for them? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c362e9p385yo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c362e9p385yo Farage is not the most extreme in his party. Sadly.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 6mo agoIronic. You are admitting that you yourself don't want to be near these people who are going to get put in detention centres (who would probably otherwise be free).
- KaiserPro 6mo agoCan you please explain to me how you managed to divine my preference for immigrants from my post? I would gently point out that if the immigration system worked like it used to, then we wouldn't need large amounts of detention centres. For two years it was illegal to process asylum claims. This meant that the backlog stacked up, costing a fuck tonne of cash. More egregiously instead of sorting the problem. Various Home secretaries chose politics rather than building systems to track and efficiently process claims. Detention centres are a massive sign of failure. I don't want them anywhere, I want my money to be spent on sorting the problem not showboating how cruel we are to people we don't like. (Which I would point out is directly against biblical teachings)
- KaiserPro 6mo ago> this is a Reform UK event No, its a Tommy Robinson (not his real name) event. Whilst the venn diagram shows crossover in policy and beliefs, its not actually a reform demo. I am uneasy about the facial recognition being used here. In terms of actual differences to how "oh shit this is going to be a violent one" protests are actually policed is not that much. There are mobile CCTV units that are deployed with plods being issued cameras to record people doing stupid shit. However, given what happened last time he organised an event like this, I can see why it might be argued that its proportionate to deploy facial recognition. I still don't like it.
- skippyboxedhero 6mo agoThere has been no violence at any of the previous marches iirc. I think people assume there must have been because Starmer and co are foaming for violence...but there weren't. Also, they have banned 11 people from getting visas because they were "agitators" and are deploying 4k police officers. Just as a reminder though, the UK has people standing for political office who were convicted of terrorist offences, we have people here leading terrorist groups in other countries, we have people turning up illegally who are carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK regularly...it is a very odd situation. One of the groups at the pro-Palestine protest is also funded by the same groups that fund Labour. There has obviously been quite a bit of violence at these events and adherents of this ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in the UK...but they are allied with a group that funds Labour so...all good.