British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Thursday that the new National Violent Disorder Program would allow law enforcement to use mass surveillance with facial recognition to deter rising crime in the United Kingdom, sparking major privacy concerns.
According to a Thursday press release, the British prime minister’s announcement came after Starmer met with police chiefs regarding the government’s plan to work with law enforcement officials to “stamp out the violent disorder seen in recent weeks.”
ABC News reported that large protests have been witnessed across the United Kingdom in the wake of a 17-year-old suspect murdering three girls and stabbing 10 other people.
In a video shared by Big Brother Watch, which is an organization dedicated to protecting privacy and defending civil liberties, Starmer said, “I can announced today that following this meeting, we will establish a national capability across police forces to tackle violent disorder.”
Starmer claimed that the “thugs” committing violence in the United Kingdom are “mobile” and are able to move from community to community. As a result, he said that the country “must have a policing response that can do the same.”
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To combat rising disorder, the British prime minister announced plans to increase shared intelligence and deploy a “wider deployment of facial recognition technology.”
“PM announces plan for increased use of Orwellian facial recognition,” Big Brother Watch tweeted in response to the prime minister’s announcement. “The alarming pledge to roll out facial recognition in response to recent disorder is a pledge to plunder more police resources on mass surveillance that threatens rather than protects democracy.”
In a press release warning of the potential consequences of the prime minister’s announcement, Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said, “This AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no explicit legal basis in the UK.”
Carlo claimed that while the facial recognition software the prime minister announced was common in countries like China and Russia, live facial recognition was “banned in Europe.”
The Big Brother Watch director also said it was “deeply worrying” that Starmer did not address the causes of the “thuggery” that has plagued the United Kingdom over the past week.
Carlo concluded, “To promise the country ineffective AI surveillance in these circumstances was frankly tone deaf and will give the public absolutely no confidence that this government has the competence or conviction to get tough on the causes of these crimes and protect the public.”
