Liberty News

Chinese police are using dark sunglasses equipped with facial recognition technology to spot criminal suspects.

The glasses are linked to a central database which contains details of criminal records. Wearing the technology, police can almost instantly view an individual's personal details, including name, ethnicity, gender and address.

Police at the Zhengzhou East Railway Station arrested seven people who were suspected of being involved in kidnapping and hit-and-run cases during an operation in January. They have also held another 26 people who were using fake identification cards.

Pictures of the operation, which were published online by the web version of China's People's Daily newspaper, show a female police officer wearing dark black sunglasses which have a small camera attached on the right-hand lens. The camera is connected by an electronic lead to a hand-held device. The device has an app where police officers can process images they have taken of suspicious individuals. The facial information captured by the glasses will be sent back to a database which provides information on whether the suspect is on the run from police, and even their recent Internet history.

An interesting observation on Twitter:

Just been at a hate crime event with the Met police + they told me something really useful. If you're on a bus + you witness a hate crime, if you give the police the number on the back of your Oyster/debit card, they can trace the bus + every passenger on it to find the culprit.

Perhaps best to avoid registering your card, and topping it up via cash.

Big Brother Watch's report, released today, reveals:

• South Wales Police store photos of all innocent people incorrectly matched by facial recognition for a year , without their knowledge, resulting in a biometric database of over 2,400 innocent people

• Home Office spent £2.6m funding South Wales Police's use of the technology, although it is "almost entirely inaccurate"

• Metropolitan Police's facial recognition matches are 98% inaccurate, misidentifying 95 people at last year's Notting Hill Carnival as criminals -- yet the force is planning 7 more deployments this year

• South Wales Police's matches are 91% inaccurat e -- yet the force plans to target the Biggest Weekend and a Rolling Stones concert next

Big Brother Watch is taking the report to Parliament today to launch a campaign calling for police to stop using the controversial technology, branded by the group as "dangerous and inaccurate".

Big Brother Watch's campaign, calling on UK public authorities to immediately stop using automated facial recognition software with surveillance cameras, is backed by David Lammy MP and 15 rights and race equality groups including Article 19, Football Supporters Federation, Index on Censorship, Liberty, Netpol, Police Action Lawyers Group, the Race Equality Foundation, and Runnymede Trust.

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott MP and Shadow Policing Minister Louise Haigh MP will speak at the report launch event in Parliament today at 1600.

Police have begun using automated facial recognition in city centres, at political demonstrations, sporting events and festivals over the past two years. Particular controversy was caused when the Metropolitan Police targeted Notting Hill Carnival with the technology two years in a row, with rights groups expressing concern that comparable facial recognition tools are more likely to misidentify black people.

Big Brother Watch's report found that the police's use of the technology is "lawless" and could breach the right to privacy protected by the Human Rights Act.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said:

"Real-time facial recognition is a dangerously authoritarian surveillance tool that could fundamentally change policing in the UK. Members of the public could be tracked, located and identified -- or misidentified -- everywhere they go.

We're seeing ordinary people being asked to produce ID to prove their innocence as police are wrongly identifying thousands of innocent citizens as criminals.

It is deeply disturbing and undemocratic that police are using a technology that is almost entirely inaccurate, that they have no legal power for, and that poses a major risk to our freedoms.

This has wasted millions in public money and the cost to our civil liberties is too high. It must be dropped."

US lawmakers from both political parties have come together to reintroduce a bill that, if passed, would prohibit the US government from forcing tech product makers to undermine users safety and security with back door access.

The bill, known as the Secure Data Act of 2018 , was returned to the US House of Representatives by Representative Zoe Lofgren and Thomas Massie.

The Secure Data Act forbids any government agency from demanding that a manufacturer, developer, or seller of covered products design or alter the security functions in its product or service to allow the surveillance of any user of such product or service, or to allow the physical search of such product, by any agency. It also prohibits courts from issuing orders to compel access to data.

Covered products include computer hardware, software, or electronic devices made available to the public. The bill makes an exception for telecom companies, which under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) would still have to help law enforcement agencies access their communication networks.

High Court judges have given the UK government six months to revise parts of its Investigatory Powers Act. The government has been given a deadline of 1 November this year to make the changes to its Snooper's Charter.

Rules governing the British surveillance system must be changed quickly because they are incompatible with European laws, said the judges.

The court decision came out of legal action by human rights group Liberty. It started its legal challenge to the Act saying clauses that allow personal data to be gathered and scrutinised violated citizens' basic rights to privacy.

The court did not agree that the Investigatory Powers Act called for a general and indiscriminate retention of data on individuals, as Liberty claimed. However in late 2017, government ministers accepted that its Act did not align with European law which only allows data to be gathered and accessed for the purposes of tackling serious crime. By contrast, the UK law would see the data gathered and held for more mundane purposes and without significant oversight.

One proposed change to tackle the problems was to create an Office for Communications Data Authorisations that would oversee requests to data from police and other organisations.

The government said it planned to revise the law by April 2019 but Friday's ruling means it now has only six months to complete the task.

Martha Spurrier, director of Liberty, said the powers to grab data in the Act put sensitive information at huge risk.

Javier Ruiz, policy director at the Open Rights Group which campaigns on digital issues, said:

We are disappointed the court decided to narrowly focus on access to records but did not challenge the general and indiscriminate retention of communications data.

The European Commission has outlined new requirements for telecoms companies, clouds, email service providers, and operators of messaging apps, to produce snooping data on a specified individual within six hours of a rquest.

The proposed European Production Order will allow a judicial authority in one Member State to request electronic evidence (such as emails, text or messages in apps) directly from internet companies with an office in any Member State. The data may be nominally held overseas but will still have to be produced.

That super-short deadline will only be imposed in the case of an emergency. Less urgent investigations have been offered a ten-day deadline.

A European Preservation Order will also be issued to stop service providers deleting data.

The Production Orders will be applicable only to crimes punishable with a maximum sentence of at least three years, but governments have been artificially increasing maximum sentences for quite a while now to ensure that relatively minor crimes can be classed as 'serious'.

The EU Commission has cited terrorism as the justifications for the new requirements, but a 3 year maximum sentence rather suggests that the these orders will be used for more widely than just for terrorism prevention.