London Police Deploy Facial Recognition at Protest for First Time

I'm old enough to remember when my colleagues were vigourously expressing concern about the potential for Oyster cards to be used to track who was protesting where.

What remains astounding about the UK is how few people benefit from this enormous scale privacy invasion. David Cameron, while leader of the opposition, managed to get his bike stolen twice, and neither time did CCTV being literally everywhere help to find who did it. Given things like that you really have to wonder what is all the surveillance for exactly?

Perhaps it will be the first protest where FR is used, but the first pilot (which ended in March) just put 2 FR cameras on a street in Croydon and they arrested "170 wanted criminals" in 6 months.

https://news.met.police.uk/news/met-makes-one-arrest-every-3...

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?

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The UK is one of the most effective and longest running surveillance states so this should not be a surprise to anyone.