Note to readers: For the past 24 hours I have had a rather unpleasant stomach bug that has made writing this post, particularly the later stages, a bit of an ordeal. Apologies in advance for any typos or other errors.
The answer, it seems, is nothing. But some governments, including the UK and Australia, are now modifying their laws to make sure it is no longer illegal.
In October last year, the UK’s Minister of Policing (and former McKinsey & Company consultant) Chris Filip unveiled plans to create a vast facial recognition database out of passport photos of people in the UK. It was as brazen and as egregious an example of mission creep as you’re likely to find. Forty-six million passport holders who had given their facial images for travel purposes alone will soon have that data used by police to conduct facial recognition searches without their consent.
It now turns out that British police departments have been doing this all along, without public knowledge or approval, for years. The covert practice has been going on since at least 2019, according to documents obtained by The Telegraph and Liberty Investigates.
The facial recognition searches were conducted despite the fact that Philip did not raise the possibility of using the passport database in this way until October 2023. Now the UK government wants to make legal a covert practice that has already been going on for years. Also, in December it was revealed that police forces will soon be able to conduct facial recognition searches on a database of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders, and have already been carrying out similar searches of the UK immigration database, which holds information on foreign nationals.
“No Explicit Legislative Basis”
Most of the biometric searches of the passport database took place during the first nine months of 2023 when law enforcement agencies used the technology to comb through passport images more than 300 times. The Home Office has defended the practice, noting that the searches were conducted for the most serious offences. But there are serious questions about its legality.
“The UK still lacks a dedicated legal framework with some experts questioning whether the use of the technology has a sound legal basis,” notes an article in Biometric Update, an industry publication on the global biometrics market. “In December, the UK Parliament’s Justice and Home Affairs Committee conducted a probe against police deployment of live facial recognition.”
David Davis, a former Conservative cabinet minister, said there was “no explicit legislative basis” for using facial recognition technology in the UK:
The data on both the UK passport database and the immigration database was not provided for these purposes. For the police to act like this undermines the data relationship between the citizen and the state. At the very least, the House of Commons should be informed precisely who authorised this and who carried it out.
As regular readers are aware, the UK Government is determined to make full use of facial recognition technologies as part of its crackdown on political protests crime, including minor offences such as shoplifting. In early August, we reported that live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government.
Police forces are also being urged to step up their use of LFR, even as the UK’s facial recognition lead recently conceded that they do not have the legal powers (yet) to deploy this technology:
The government’s new Data Protection and Digital Information Act, expected to become law in the coming months, seeks to abolish the roles of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commission (BSCC), an independent advisory board that was, to some extent, helping to hold the public sector to account for its use of AI. In its bid to eliminate the BSCC, the government clearly wants to have even freer reign to surveil and control the lives of British. The outgoing Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Professor Fraser Sampson, described the move as “shocking” and “tantamount to vandalism”.
A Similar Case Down Under
But the UK is not the only country where the government and/or law enforcement agencies have been using biometric identity or surveillance systems illegally, or without public disclosure. In Australia, one of the countries in the so-called “Collective West” furthest along the path to launching a digital identity system, government departments were accused in October last year of conducting hundreds of millions of identity checks illegally over a period of four years…
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Nick Corbishley 