Dear All,
A friend sent me a video last night from a guy called Rob Braxman in California.
In the video Rob went through all the ways that facial recognition cameras are being rolled out around the World to remove our privacy and impede our freedom.
Just a very short section of the video was about the face recognition cameras being used on the roads in his home town of Los Angeles;
“In my city of Los Angeles there are street cameras actively taking facial recognition shots. You get speeding tickets with your face prominently recognized based on your driver’s licence.
I have seen these traffic tickets in action and it actually states on the tickets that they use facial recognition!
Los Angeles also uses cameras on the freeway in addition to street cameras to actually track both your face and your license plate.
(I’ve just tidied up the above a bit so it reads better, because it doesn’t transcribe properly direct from a video).
So what does this have to do with the UK, I hear you ask?
Well, I wrote a blog post 13 months ago entitled Happy 2020! …Time To Take Our Freedom Back? in which I mused about how we were creeping towards totalitarianism the UK…
In the blog post, I didn’t even realise that face recognition cameras were already being deployed here at the time. A BTST Member and “whistleblower”, Ron, left this comment (slightly shortened here):
“I am in the CCTV Industry installing, servicing, specifying systems etc, and am in the front line of technology, especially from China with all the new innovations with AI Technology.
Adam is spot on in that they already have this facial recognition software and other innovations like gait technology in full use in China and a few of its provinces where they consider a threat to their way of life and keeping the population under control. Now it is being used in the UK right under our noses like in shopping arcades, at football matches and anywhere where the foot traffic is extremely busy.
I am not happy with the way our society is now becoming a big brother society, but its the way I make my living.
So I’m like the proverbial Turkey voting for Christmas.”
So, I ask: Are facial recognition cameras now being used on our roads in the UK? Note I used the word “our” and not “the governments”, because we paid for them and we are the ones who use them.
A quick google search doesn’t really bring anything up. This is not surprising, because over the last year or so they’ve been engaged in massive censorship, manually removing content from search results that doesn’t fit their agenda (or that of whoever it is they answer to…).
I would have to say at this point that we should assume we are being tracked on the UK’s road networks. Not by our government issued number plates, but by our faces.
You may be in the camp of people who say “well, if I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t have anything to worry about!”.
If you are in this camp, I respectfully urge caution:
1) Who decides what is right and what is wrong? Is it you, or someone else?; 2) If you look at history, totalitarianism starts almost imperceptibly, with freedoms being slowly peeled away in the name of some greater good. I think we all have a pretty good idea about what happens after that…
I’ll leave you with that thought :-)
All the best,
Adam
PS. I’ve just recorded a quick TALEX 3 update for you below. I thought it would be easier to explain the current status in a video than via email :-) TLDR: All looking good, just need to get final firmware version with all of the fixes we’ve already signed off on!