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Security United Kingdom Privacy Technology

British Cops Will Scan Every Fan's Face At the Champions League Final (vice.com) 89

Using a new facial recognition surveillance system, British police will scan every fan's face at the UEFA Champions League on June 3rd and compare them to a police database of some 500,000 "persons of interest." "According to a government tender issued by South Wales Police, the system will be deployed during the day of the game in Cardiff's main train station, as well as in and around the Principality Stadium situated in the heart of Cardiff's central retail district." From the report: Cameras will potentially be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 visitors plus the many more thousands of people in the vicinity of the bustling Saturday evening city center on match day, June 3. Captured images will then be compared in real time to 500,000 custody images stored in the police information and records management system alerting police to any "persons of interest," according to the tender. The security operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology by London's Metropolitan Police during 2016's Notting Hill Carnival.
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British Cops Will Scan Every Fan's Face At the Champions League Final

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  • by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @05:43PM (#54309229) Homepage Journal

    The stereotypical dystopian world where people shuffle around without ever looking up is already here.
    We just didn't know that cameras would be the reason.

    • You mean like the Hunger Games? Because that book was awesome!

    • The stereotypical dystopian world where people shuffle around without ever looking up is already here.
      We just didn't know that cameras would be the reason.

      In light of the now several terrorist attacks on major, public events, I think the majority of people will welcome this. We are not all paranoid about surveillance - I personally tend to look at cameras with positive interest and sometimes wave at the (potential) guy at the other end. Silly, I know, and no doubt you will call me an idiot or worse, but I know what I am and I am self-assured enough to feel comfortable about it, so what what do I care?

      When people go to a football match, perhaps bringing their

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        I personally tend to look at cameras with positive interest and sometimes wave at the (potential) guy at the other end. Silly, I know, and no doubt you will call me an idiot or worse, but I know what I am and I am self-assured enough to feel comfortable about it, so what what do I care?

        That would be "worse".
        The three letter agencies are not your friends, and it doesn't matter what you know you are, what matters for them is to do their job, which includes investigating matches. Looking at numbers, the risk of becoming a false positive seems far higher than the chance of them picking the right person.

        No matter how innocent you are, cops coming to fetch you at work or swatting your home with neighbors watching is not going to make your future bright, no matter how comfortable and carefree y

  • by Moheeheeko ( 1682914 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @05:44PM (#54309233)
    Time to get into the face transplant business.
    • by x0ra ( 1249540 )
      It's already exist, it's called "face paint". It's enough to disrupt the "AI" behind the matching.
      • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        They're talking about an event on June 3rd. Males can take advantage of this time frame by 1. growing a full beard, if they don't normally have a beard, or 2. if they do normally wear a beard, shave it off on June 2nd. That, a couple of team logo decals on your cheeks and forehead, and a pair of dazzle glasses or sunglasses should take care of it. A celebrity-face t-shirt (perhaps an image of one of your team's players) will help.

        Maybe some gimmick sunglasses with LEDs flashing away around the rims.

        • Re:Minority Report (Score:4, Interesting)

          by infolation ( 840436 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @11:10PM (#54310729)
          On slashdot that would work. But meanwhile in the real world of UK policing:
          • Police spotters identify the individuals with facepaint/hoods/etc.
          • Police approach them and ask them for name & ID (eg debit card) to weed out the 'ordinary people'.
          • If anyone resists, claims their rights not to give name, are belligerent etc, police wave a drug dog somewhere near them which barks on cue (signal from handler)
          • Police now have 'reasonable suspicion' and demand name, address, DoB etc. If they think the person might be of interest, they'll run an on-the-spot fingerprint scan against the Police National Computer.

          Am not saying this is right, but have seen this happen many times at festivals, protests, demonstrations, rallys etc.

    • Nah, just sell those glasses frames that confused facial recognition systems:
      http://www.theverge.com/2016/1... [theverge.com]
      *everyone* is the Queen of England.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Just have somebody pummel your face so it swells all funny. I'll volunteer to assist. You might even look better after.

  • ... Amazon servers incorrectly responded to a DDoS:

    Groucho Marx Glasses [amazon.com]

  • I'm going, but since I'm not a fan, I won't be scanned.

    -1 Literal Pandemic

  • Nice work Airstrip One.

  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @06:12PM (#54309391)

    The American definition of 'Person of Interest' is someone who has not been formally accused or charged with a crime, which means they don't have enough evidence yet. If you don't have enough to charge a person, you shouldn't have enough to run public facial recognition scans for them.

    If you're ready to arrest them on sight, that's enough for me. That's a good standard.

    But what about everyone else? Do you really think the cops won't keep every face they capture, for comparison against future images from security cameras? Do you think they won't start analyzing who shows up where and the correlation with criminal activity to create lists of suspects?

    They cast this net as far and wide as the technology permits unless and until they're reined in by law. Given enough cameras and enough processing power, they'd gladly follow every citizen all day long, because it'd make their job much easier.

    The public needs to decide just how much privacy they're willing to sacrifice in the name of security, and get their legislative representatives to give that decision the force of law... or the cops will take all their privacy without even blinking. Not because they're evil, but because their job is to catch bad guys, not consider the moral and philosophical issues of the tools and methods they use to catch them.

    • The public needs to decide just how much privacy they're willing to sacrifice in the name of security, and get their legislative representatives to give that decision the force of law... or the cops will take all their privacy without even blinking.

      I believe the UK has already lost this battle. [theguardian.com]

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The UK did that when it to had to deal with Ireland related funding and support issues in the 1960-90's.
      All the UK did was focus on every existing and emerging network of people, lawyers, banking, faith and media that offered political cover, peace groups and political fronts, international funding and supply network that supported Irish interests.
      All telco networks into and out of Ireland, every interesting person in the UK and Ireland. Low cost, easy for the UK gov and such methods got results globall
    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Wikileaks through the efforts of Julian Assange and the rest of the Wikieleaks team https://wikileaks.org/-Partner... [wikileaks.org] and http://www.wikileaks-forum.com... [wikileaks-forum.com], we know that the US governments consider every single person on this planet as a person of interest, someone who might need to be controlled, a potential target and they did disclose their intent to specifically target political activists for thought crimes.

      Lets be blunt, you idiots worry about facial recognition at a sporting venue, what the fuck do y

    • The pit bulls are a good thing, so is the chain. The pit bulls running into the chain is an important event - sad the political pit bulls have no chain. that spells disaster for the innocent public that needs the chain...
  • by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @06:23PM (#54309447) Homepage Journal

    Face dazzle paint in team colors, reversible pattern hoodie and scarf, fake nose and or eyebrows (team colors).

    Hit ratio drops from 50 percent false positive to below threshold.

    Basically, if it worked during WW II, it still works. That's how inaccurate facial recognition actually is. It's even worse for women than for men.

    • So, Mr Potato Head?

  • Hello,

    I have 2 tickets to sell for the Champions League Final. I will make you a good deal.

  • It's even worse than Fahrenheit 454
  • by davecb ( 6526 ) <davecb@spamcop.net> on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @06:38PM (#54309557) Homepage Journal

    They have 170,000 * 500,000 faces, for a total of 85,000,000,000 comparisons. If you have a 99% chance of sucess (ie, NOT identifying grandma as a wanted terrorist), then a 1% failure rate will give you 850,000,000 wrong comparisons.

    In tests with football-crowd-sized sets of people, the very best recognizers hit 80% and the worst were below 20% accurate. See http://www.washington.edu/news... [washington.edu]

    How many people will be pulled out of line, I wonder, before the police notice that the're getting an larger number of false positives than they were prepared to handle? I wonder if it will identify everyone who shows up as a terrorist (:-))

    --dave
    [The German federal security service noticed this many years ago, when they tried to scan airports with a former employer's product]

    • you may be overestimating the number of comparisons. It's entirely possible that the faces are grouped based on particular characteristics and that any given face might be sorted into a group's parameters first, before then being compared to faces within it. It's still likely to be a stupidly big number of comparisons, but a comparison system that is designed with even a slightest degree of intelligence will have many fewer false positives that you are suggesting.
      • by davecb ( 6526 )
        I quite agree: it's the stupidly-large-number part of the equation that causes the false positives to be insane!
    • I wonder if it will identify everyone who shows up as a terrorist (:-))

      At a British football match doesn't kind of go without saying?

  • Stop watching sports, turn off the TV. Period. It's the only language these fuckers understand-losing money.

    Hit them where it hurts, make sure you don't spend one dime on any of their products or events.

    Distractionball is only there to keep your mind off of what the elites are really doing, anyway.

    • >Distractionball is only there to keep your mind off of what the elites are really doing, anyway

      Lemmie tell you something - LIFE is a distraction. One after another until you're dead. You just hope you get enough interesting distractions along the way that you mostly enjoy your time among the living.

      If being a sports fan works for someone to the point they surrender their wallet to the media companies and their privacy to the government (and media companies...), well, OK. I'd like everyone to have the

      • I'm really not knocking someone who enjoys sports. But shouldn't there be a line in the sand? How much will people really take?

        If no one ever speaks up, they keep pushing and taking more and more. Part of my personal path to happiness is leaving a better world for the next generation than the one I was thrown into. A dystopian surveillance state is not better.

        Besides, are you implying that one should only care about things that personally affect him right this second? If that's the case, I suppose I should

        • >But shouldn't there be a line in the sand?

          Yes. But I think this one is more of a 'espouse opinion whenever the opportunity comes up, encourage people to write their rep (or even better, their preferred candidate in the next election cycle) and then vote' type situation than a 'grab the pitchforks and torches' one.

          > I suppose I should just leave my family behind, go buy a Hummer, and spend the rest of my days eating double-cheeseburgers and partying with hookers and blow.

          If I can occasionally visit m

    • Cute, we've seen how this worked when the TSA showed up, groping all passengers in their crotch.
      • Cute, we've seen how this worked when the TSA showed up, groping all passengers in their crotch

        Mostly little boys.

  • by UpnAtom ( 551727 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @07:44PM (#54309951)

    Theresa May passed what Snowden called "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies."

    Before this, airports were making 3D models of flyers' faces without their knowledge or permission, and attaching such to their passport records. This happens if you go through the 'inbound' e-passport aisle. I saw this with my own eyes at Bristol Airport before a security guard shouted at me. There is no law against such data collection.

    I don't know if you can get a ticket with cash but otherwise you can bet these facial/3D scans will be added to a GCHQ database.

    • May is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure it's an old internet fact that has some truth to it, that London has more security cameras than most countries on the planet. Just london. And has done for a very long time. This isn't surprising, or new.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Sounds like a practice run to see how well this system works and to get the public used to the idea for when they start using it for political protests, civil disobedience, grassroots organizing, etc.. The ruling elite are terrified of the people right now.

  • That's why they should ban the burqa. The terrorists are the only ones that won't be tracked.
  • I bet that in this case "persons of interest" comprises every plebe on the whole damned planet. I think this exercise is just an excuse to take a lot of pictures so they can significantly enlarge their 'faces' database, get better photos of faces they already have catalogued, and take note of connections among people to give more detail, depth and breadth to the profiles they're already building on every citizen. This is Big Brother's Big Data at its finest, most perverse, and most dangerous. Look for such

  • by wardrich86 ( 4092007 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @10:15AM (#54313051)
    I have a feeling there could be a large market for shirts with this pattern printed on it [tnwcdn.com].
  • The funny thing is that people probably wouldn't mind this except that government just can't keep out of the honey .jar.
    If big gov grew up and showed some ethics and could be trusted to only use this against actual bad people and to throw away the captures it could give them what they want if what they want is just to catch bad guys while not raping privacy.

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