I just want to bring up a difference that I've noticed living in both London and the US (Chicago and San Francisco). Note that I am also not trying to make a point here, as to what is better for a city. I think it's much more complex than spying on your citizen. Just trying to bring my perspective and things I've seen:
London is one the safest city I've lived in (along with Beijing). Chicago and San Francisco are the most unsafe cities I've lived in. People often don't realize this there, it's just that they have been desensitized to it.
I've seen countless accidents in the US, people getting bullied or mugged, cars getting broken in, homeless people everywhere (sometimes shooting themselves up with syringes). Walking in the streets at night can be really dangerous. Most people avoid public transport here and take uber.
On the other side you have London. You'd see single girls walking alone in the streets at 4am. Everyone takes the public transport, never seen anyone fight, almost no homeless people, everybody loves the cops. It's a different world.
> never seen anyone fight, almost no homeless people
…Do you live in a different London from me? You must be talking about London, Ontario, right?
There were at least three major Islamic terror attacks around my address in London in the past few years. I live just by Borough Market.
There were the three guys who drove the van into Borough Market and stabbed people, killing eight. There was the guy who drove his car into people on Westminster Bridge, killing five and injuring 50. There was also the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich, in the street in the middle of the day outside a primary school. Lee Rigby was a colleague of my best friend. My best friend and I were walking exactly where the murder was to take place a few weeks prior.
I'm also quite shocked you don't notice the homeless in London. Before I started my career in IT — when I was a broke musician — I used to eat with them every day. Hare Krishna feed the homeless most evenings in Holborn, and at the time on some nights you could get leftover Pret a Manger meals outside the Rymans on the Strand.
There's almost always people sleeping rough around London Bridge, and in many places all throughout the city. And if you enjoy the nightlife you're bound to see at least some street violence occasionally.
…Nobody seemed to be affected? Are you on drugs? People died.
And yes, I have been to SF and LA. I have walked through the tent cities and seen the people defecating in the streets. That was never the question, and your whataboutery is not constructive.
Spending the absurd amount of money that's going towards building a surveillance state on making staircases safer instead will save several magnitudes more lifes each year.
That's not because a lot of people break their neck walking up stairs, it's because how disproportionate and irrational the response to the terror scare is.
If news reported on every case of people dying a preventable death while utilizing something we have learned to build in a safer manner by now, they'd do little else.
Dying a preventable death is kind of embarrassing for the family and the deceased. Especially if it was caused by improper use of something worthy of a Darwin award.
Regular crime in the city, I haven't even heard of people talking about it. Maybe in the few days following the attack yes, but come on. That's just FUD.
JFC. I have English, Polish, and Australian citizenships.
I have lived in London, Newcastle, Sydney, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Warsaw, and Gdansk.
I have travelled the world most of my life, and I now perpetually travel, more or less living out of a suitcase. I have long-stayed in six different countries this year alone.
Refrain from sharing your opinions online unless you actually know what you're talking about. Clearly, you don't.
> On the other side you have London. You'd see single girls walking alone in the streets at 4am. Everyone takes the public transport, never seen anyone fight, almost no homeless people, everybody loves the cops. It's a different world.
You must have lived in the nicer parts of London, perhaps. I have a friend who has moved to London 6 months ago (her bf was already living there) and she told me that she's afraid of leaving her home all by herself after 8PM. She told me that while walking down the street she can "feel" the looks of the people whose religion I won't mention because I will probably get a ban, take that as you like.
She had friends of the same religion here in Eastern Europe, but they were the kind of people that were staying at after parties at 7 in the morning. The people she now tells me about don’t look like they have shared a drink with a woman late at night anytime during their life. It’s easy to accuse someone of bigotism when you haven’t interacted directly with any of the talked-about people.
I'm going to guess that the religion in question is Islam, which forbids alcohol. Her being okay with the kind of Muslim who isn't religious enough to follow this proscription doesn't disprove her being a bigot. "Doesn't look like they have shared a drink with a woman late at night anytime during their life" is a poor basis for being afraid of someone. Many don't choose that lifestyle. Some will judge you for choosing it. Fewer will physically attack you for choosing it...
If they're leering at her (she said she can "feel" their looks, which could mean looks of moral judgement or of objectification/lust), I can start to understand why she'd be afraid. But there is a subjective element to interpreting others' body language, and bringing religion into the complaint makes me think prejudice might be coloring that.
As far as I could understand by talking with other women they can feel when other men look at them in “that” way, and they can feel if they should be frightened or not, and that “way” can look the more frightening the more those men haven’t had regular and normal interactions with women, no matter those men’s religion, that’s what my friend was afraid about. And yes, men that don’t have frequent and especially normal interactions with women do look more frightening to women, and it so happens that certain religions do impose (for whatever reasons) that men and women should live almost separate lives.
I've certainly heard similar things from women about "that" kind of look, and I wouldn't have really questioned it if religion weren't brought in. They might be right about if they "should" be frightened. I'm not going to say otherwise, and I support their personally doing what they need to feel safe, based on whatever information they think is best.
However, when it comes to setting public policy that trades off against individual liberty, authoritatively stating which of N cities is safest, and so on, I think the bar should be higher. Statements should be based on hard data such as numbers of violent attacks. This isn't practical for individuals (imagine: "based on extensive personal trials, I was murdered ten times as often by people who...") but is on the scale of cities/states/countries.
Interesting thread about the relative safety of cities, but wait...hang on: now simply looking at someone is perceived as threatening? Not catcalling or showing aggression... simply making eye contact?? I’ll take a note to avoid all eye contact in the future. I’m not a city person so I had no idea how little it takes to be considered a threat.
In a big city it's generally considered bad form to look at others too much. Making eye contact is something I would avoid, but mostly because it can be seen as threatening (I'm assuming you're a guy) and can lead to you being ganged up somewhere dark if you do it to the wrong person.
That's a weird take to be honest. Muslim people here are very integrated, the mayor is muslim himself. I haven't heard of this kind of problem except for Luton. Which is not London.
I don’t know what you mean when you say that the Muslims are integrated in London. This is not the way I view things at all. It seems like a knee-jerk reaction many people have when another person complains about Muslims. Why should they even necessarily be integrated? This is just London.
Since time immemorial, London has a lot of separate cultures, each doing their own thing. Sometimes people interact too, which is also nice. Walk down Bethnal Green Road one day. Observe the locals of Bangladeshi descent wearing their traditional clothing, going to their sweet shops, jewellers and butchers, speaking their language. I wouldn’t call this integration.
It's not possible to believe London got better because of all the cameras added the last few years (which accomplish little or nothing). It hasn't gotten safer because of surveillance. Just like in the us, the fact that the border patrol takes people's phones at a high rate hasn't made it any safer. It's just improved spying.
I've been to London twice, and compared with Vienna I felt less safe, especially when riding the Tube as opposed to the U-Bahn. Even Berlin felt chill to me in comparison.
Not that my feelings are a good indication of anything, but comparing any European city to San Francisco and Chicago will leave you with a similar conclusion regarding personal safety.
We took bids from a variety of suppliers and it turns out that bespoke and competent totalitarianism in Orwell's '1984' model is rather expensive and will restrict how much money will be available for the minister to spend on grouse shooting in the Scottish Highlands.
So we took the liberty of soliciting a range of bids at different price points and as it turns out, G4S brought up a lovely little offering that they have titled 'Central Services from Terry Gilliam's Brazil'.
It is both cheap and looks the part, but most importantly, doesn't rely on anything actually working or anybody doing anything that could reasonably be described as work, especially at the top end, thus freeing up far more time for golf.
You, I like you. One thing I believe you missed is the the promise from G4S of a cushy 'director' role for said minister when politics has run its course, for said minister....
Ahh yes, well it is a jolly little number that, but be aware not to discuss it with your colleagues until you are well out of department. We don't want it coming up in committee, now do we? You don't want it becoming a wash.
The real purpose of this isn't to be accurate. The reasons are likely to make Londoners accustomed to even more surveillance and/or to give them some "legitimate" reason they can appeal to when they want to persecute someone for less glamorous reasons like ethnicity or economic status.
Step 1: deploy crappy system, let everybody mock it and quickly forget.
Step 2: update software so it actually works. People think "how accurate can it be, it was crap just a short while ago"
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.
Plot twist: it's actually 100% accurate. It knows everyone has committed at least one minor crime in their lifetimes due to a perfect mix or ambiguous legal wording, innumerable laws and ease of committing minor crimes. They'll need to tweak its tolerance level.
More like 1: Frame the discussion around technical problems instead of social ones. Let opponents fixate on false positives. 2: Fix the technical problems. 3: Watch your opponents squirm as they try to pivot to a different rhetoric much too late.
I think that a lot of British people have a set of beliefs about their country that are mostly inaccurate and increasingly divergent from reality.
One is that other countries look up to Britain and are keen to trade on terms dictated by Britain. Brexit is exposing this delusion.
A second is that Britain has a fearsome military that allows it to project its influence as a global power around the world.
A third is that Britain is the birth place of civil rights, has always fought against totalitarianism and has a legal system that since Magna Carta has always protected the primacy of the individual against the state. It's much easier to ignore the increasing number of CCTV cameras when you can just tell yourself that Britain invented Magna Carta so how could Britain's civil liberties not be the envy of the world.
With ID cards I think some of the opposition to them comes from the belief that they're the kind of thing a continental European country would do, as well as resentment against being obliged to carry something by the government. RIPA and CCTV aren't so much of a concern because they don't impose a physical obligation and so are only going to be bothersome to suspect people anyway.
I sometimes think that if/when Britain becomes a dictatorship it'll be a brutally-enforced version of Middle England, with death sentences for people who don't put their bins out properly and so on.
>I sometimes think that if/when Britain becomes a dictatorship it'll be a brutally-enforced version of Middle England, with death sentences for people who don't put their bins out properly and so on.
You just reminded me of this old bit of news -
- Half of councils use anti-terror laws to spy on 'bin crimes'
> With ID cards I think some of the opposition to them comes from the belief that they're the kind of thing a continental European country would do, as well as resentment against being obliged to carry something by the government.
I don't keep any ID with me. I don't see government issued ID as a means to identify me on the streets, but rather as a way of identifying myself for public and private services.
I can't really wrap my head around the fact that not all countries have ID. There must be a way to know who to tax, and who to service?
As someone else said, it's mostly a figleaf because in practice the government does everything an ID requires, just in roundabout ways. For tax stuff everyone has a National Insurance number (I think assigned at birth?) so in a sense everyone already does have a unique identifier but you can't use a National Insurance card as ID because it doesn't have a photo. Instead you just have to present a random selection of documents like a driving licence, utility bill, letter from the council etc whenever you want to open an account somewhere.
I personally don't have any problem with national ID for the reasons you state.
> RIPA and CCTV aren't so much of a concern because they don't impose a physical obligation and so are only going to be bothersome to suspect people anyway.
This is generally known as the 'nothing to hide' argument [1], for what it's worth.
Who said we're fine with this? Mostly it's apathy and ignorance, partly it's that if you go up against the authorities you know your card is going to be marked.
Check the news. Plenty of rioting in the UK, although we prefer mass disobedience. If you work in the real world though, i.e. outside academia, prepare to be blacklisted.
More stupidly, the UK has effectively hard national ID requirements (have to show ID and proof of residence/employment visa status in order to work, rent privately; ID checks on having a bank account and house purchases etc), but no national ID.
Often utility bills get used instead.
(I was actually part of the NO2ID campaign because we anticipated that it would be used for essentially discriminatory purposes like this, as well as the giant highly vulnerable database. It never occcured to us that they could impose ID requirements without issuing the cards!)
This is great news - an expensive and highly publicized failure of FR means it will be a long time before other municipalities start looking to "invest" in it.
Prior work by the Met includes the "ring of steel" anti-terrorist surveillance zone, and the whole dodgy business of "super-recognisers" as well as the use of face recognition on crowds of protestors.
The police are very nice people assisting in the theft of peoples facial profiles. They work for a little bit of money, take on a bit of angry response and sniggers from passers ny, and hand over the data to private industry, with free pass from government to bill the tax payer billions, since the data, well, you know, needs to be kept secure. Police officer gets there weekly wage, a bit of fun beating up a few who disagree, and private security contractor makes all the money. I here them laughing now, “yeah, we monetise loads of innocent peoples face profiles, they think its to save them from terrorists lol, the police stole it for us, lol”
They should probably use a well-known public figure, such as the prime minister--someone whose movements can also be partially verified against public calendars--to verify that the system is working. Or just hire someone to walk a known path through camera FOVs regularly, using varying efforts to disguise appearance and at different times of day.
Well I'm glad somebody does! Regular people are losing big time here--facial recognition tech has a huge false positive rate, and probably a ridiculous false negative, rate, too. It's junk, but they keep pushing and pushing for it like it is some miracle tech.
I always thought the weird face makeup in those dystopian sci-fi films like Johnny Mnemonic were just there to make the street hacker type characters look edgy, but in fact, even back in the '70s and '80s, the authors were on to something.
> A number of unknowns make this tech a questionable solution for its stated purpose. We have no idea how many hot list criminals were scanned and not matched
I don't think the article's author had sufficient information to make any claims about success rates. Counting "not identified" as an error is wrong if the system only expects to identify hot-list faces - which is also more protective of privacy for those not on a list.
There were five alerts generated due to a positive match, and five of them were false positives. We have no idea how many of the ~500 individuals on the watch list were scanned and missed, and we have no idea how many faces were scanned, but it's still a 100 percent failure rate.
You are all demonstrating you don't know how FR works, nor the article author. FR is a technology that helps to identify, it is not "the authority" and was never intended as such - but hard explaining that to any journalist, or people predisposed by fear journalism. When an FR system scans people and produces "false positives" - that is what you want. The system is tuned sensitive to generate false positives on purpose, so a human can then make the final determination. The point being, a human cannot look at thousands of faces and remain objective, but they can look at a dozen and tell if they have the person they are seeking. The FR system does the labor of throwing away the obvious non-matches, and shows the operator possible matches for final confirmation. That is their design. FR systems are not tuned the other way, because you are trying to help find someone, not be the authority on finding them. Such a system will never know their "false negatives" when dealing with the public - but comparing their ROC Curves ("false negatives", "false positives", "true negatives" and "true positives") is exactly how they are measured and compared when selecting which FR system is better. The key take away is: they are not intended to be an autonomous agent, they are used by a human to help scan more people than they can alone, and it is the human who makes the final identification.
>You are all demonstrating you don't know how FR works, nor the article author. FR is a technology that helps to identify, it is not "the authority" and was never intended as such - but hard explaining that to any journalist, or people predisposed by fear journalism.
I'm not afraid of facial recognition. I fear what "the authority" can do with such a system, both intentionally and accidentally. High false positive rates may be necessary to get the best facial recognition, but they're also a reason to oppose facial recognition.
