London's Top Cop Says 'Big Tech,' Encryption Are Letting The Terrorists Win

from the applying-excessive-force-to-a-horse's-corpse dept

Dame Cressida Dick -- the former National Policing Lead for Counter-Terrorism -- has had an op-ed published by The Telegraph that leverages the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to advocate for less privacy and security for routine targets of terrorist attacks: everyday people without powerful government positions.

Writing from her latest official position -- that of Metropolitan Police Commissioner -- Dame Dick says the War on Terror can be won… sort of. (Paywalled but here's an alternate link.)

The future, as ever, is uncertain - as exemplified by the situation in Afghanistan as we wait to see how events there might once again impact on the terrorism landscape. But as I reflect on what has passed since 9/11, I am confident that we continue to develop the exceptional tools and capabilities that will give our counter-terrorism officers the best chance of successfully confronting the threats that will emerge over the next 20 years.

That's just a small part of it. It's headlined by this declaration by the Police Commissioner:

Terrorists seek to divide us -- they won't win

Not so fast, Cressida. Right in the middle of your own op-ed is an admission the terrorists have won, at least using these metrics.

The threat of sophisticated terrorist cells being directed from overseas has been added to by that of the individuals carrying out rudimentary attacks with very little planning or warning. The current focus on encryption by many big tech companies is only serving to make our job to identify and stop these people even harder, if not impossible in some cases.

And there it is: the thing that divides us. Government officials continue to insist that if encryption can be used by terrorists and criminals, then it really shouldn't be accessible to all the non-terrorists who use it to secure their personal information and communications. If the end goal of terrorist attacks is to drive a wedge between the public and their public servants, mission accomplished.

The public would like to have actual security. The government would prefer the illusion of security: a nonexistent form of encryption that only allows good guys to peek in on "secure" communications. And, on the flip side, these officials believe the only people who really "need" encrypted communications are criminals and terrorists since they have the most to hide. If that's the only real market for encryption, then non-terrorists should be happy using insecure communications options because they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear from their governments.

And while we're on the subject of reasoning that's mostly circular, The Telegraph manages to close its own loop by dropping a link in Dame Cressida Dick's op-ed. That link takes you to this article ("Tech giants are making it impossible to stop terrorists, says Dame Cressida Dick"), which opens with this:

Tech giants are making it impossible to identify and stop terrorists carrying out deadly attacks, Dame Cressida Dick warns on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner - who was granted a two-year extension on her contract on Friday - said the introduction of end-to-end encryption, which allows users to message one another in complete secrecy, was giving terrorists an advantage over law enforcement.

Companies such as Facebook have argued that introducing encryption will improve privacy for their customers.

But writing in The Telegraph, Dame Cressida warns that terrorists are exploiting such technological advances to radicalise people and direct attacks around the world.

That last link takes you back to Cressida's op-ed, which contains one paragraph about Big Tech and encryption -- a paragraph that is quoted in its entirety further down the page in this separate article. The op-ed links to the article… which links to the op-ed… which links to the article. It's a neat trick, one that makes one hand clapping sound like applause. One could theoretically spend hours opening each self-referential link, allowing Dick's single argument to become a groundswell movement that gradually consumes every last bit of available RAM (mainly looking at you, Chrome).

And that's as good a metaphor as any for the anti-encryption agitation of officials like the Dame. Like other law enforcement officials who would like to see encryption backdoored if not eliminated completely, the Dame's attacks on encryption appear to operate under the theory that if someone says something often enough, and authoritatively enough, then some people are going to believe these assertions are true.

And at the end of all of this, it must be pointed out that the split between law enforcement officials and security experts continues to increase. But the terrorists didn't cause this split. The War on Terror did. The response to the 9/11 attacks was a power grab by the government, which suddenly had the justification it needed to curtail rights and liberties it often found inconvenient. And now it's Big Government complaining about Big Tech, using terrorism as an excuse to undermine security for everyone.

Filed Under: cressida dick, encryption, london, metropolitan police, terrorism

London's Facial Recognition Rollout Trips Over The Pandemic As Facemasks Render The System Even More Useless

from the of-course,-some-people-still-refuse-to-wear-them-so... dept

The rollout of London's facial recognition cameras -- hundreds of them -- is being held up by unexpected developments. No, it's not the efforts of legislators, privacy activists, or some sudden concern about the unreliability of the tech. It's the global pandemic, which has taken away many of the facial features the cameras are looking for. (h/t Jeffrey Nonken in the TD Chat window)

The Metropolitan Police is considering whether to pause its use of facial recognition cameras because so many Londoners are wearing face masks.

Use of the technology, which was deployed across London from January in a bid to spot serious criminals, is regarded as controversial by civil liberties campaigners.

One assembly member, Caroline Pidgeon, made the obvious point that a rollout during a pandemic necessitating face mask use isn't the best timing for tech that already has demonstrated an inability to correctly recognize unmasked faces.

This point is driven home in a letter composed by Pidgeon and Sian Berry, another assembly member. The letter says the tech's failures -- and the lack of public input or oversight -- means Londoners should only expect bad things from a large-scale rollout of live facial recognition.

In a letter published [PDF] on the London Assembly website, the two elected representatives said: "We both believe that the way in which LFR [live facial recognition] is being rolled out as an operational tool in London is ill-advised, and that this technology will have a chilling effect on civil liberties if it is not used with clarity, accountability and with full democratic consent."

The letter says the tech used by the Metropolitan Police isn't merely error-prone. It's pretty much all errors, all the time.

In a recent answer to a written question, the Mayor made clear that in the first two deployments of LFR this year more than 13,000 faces were scanned. Out of these 13,200 people scanned only six individuals were stopped. However, of those six, five were misidentified and incorrectly stopped by the police, not being wanted for any crime. Furthermore, of the total of eight people who created a ‘system alert’, seven were incorrectly identified. This is a concerning pattern of inaccuracy and misidentification of innocent people, which was also identified during the trials of this technology.

The letter also points out that London's law enforcement has refused to cooperate with the government's oversight of this tech, telling legislators to refer to previously published documents rather than directing them to anything more recent that might provide insight on the current state of the technology. The assembly members say the available documents do not fully address tests mandated by the London Policing Ethics Panel. They also note that while the Ethics Panel has suggested this tech only be used to investigate "serious crimes," the Metropolitan Police has made it clear it has no intention to comply with this guideline.

The letter asks more questions of the MPS which will likely also go unanswered. The assembly members want assurance these systems won't be deployed during protests, demonstrations, or public events. They also want to know if the forces of law and order are cool with blowing off Parliamentary directives.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for a halt to the police's use of live facial recognition, until relevant regulations are in place. Do you feel comfortable ignoring Parliament?

The answer to the last one is probably "yes." The Metropolitan Police has continued to deploy the tech despite a constant stream of false positives. The only thing standing between it and a full rollout is the pandemic itself. The MPS can't honestly say its system will be a useful crime fighting tool when people's faces are partially hidden from view. The MPS couldn't honestly say this prior to en masse mask-wearing, but at least the system still had access to full faces. Continuing the rollout would show the police care more about playing with their toys then ensuring the safety and well-being of London residents.

Filed Under: cameras, covid-19, face masks, facial recognition, london, metropolitan police, privacy

London Police Move Forward With Full-Time Deployment Of Facial Recognition Tech That Can't Accurately Recognize Faces

from the don't-let-the-fact-that-it-doesn't-work-stop-you dept

The London Metropolitan Police sure loves its facial recognition tech. But it's an unrequited love. The tech doesn't appear to have done anything for the Met during its past deployments.

Documents obtained by Big Brother Watch in 2018 showed the Met's deployments had rung up a 98% false positive rate in May of that year. Nothing improved as time went on. Subsequent documents showed a false positive rate of 100%. Every "match" was wrong. Not exactly the sort of thing you want to hear about tech capable of scanning 300 faces per second.

This followed an earlier report covering a test run by the South Wales Police at a handful of public events. In comparison, the South Wales tests were a success: a mere 92% of its matches were false positives.

The Met's tech showed some slight improvement in 2019, moving up to a 96% false positive rate. This continued failure to recognize faces -- along with a number of privacy concerns -- prompted a UK Parliamentary Committee to call for an end of the use of facial recognition tech by UK government agencies. This advice was ignored by the Home Office, which apparently believed UK law enforcement would be able to fail upwards towards a brave new world of facial recognition tech worth the money being spent on it.

We've apparently reached that inflection point. Test runs are a thing of the past. It's time for Londoners to put their best face forward.

British police are to start operational use of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in London, despite warnings over privacy from rights groups and concerns expressed by the government's own surveillance watchdog.

First used in the capital at the Notting Hill carnival in 2016, the cameras will alert police when they spot anyone already on "wanted" lists.

"The use of live facial recognition technology will be intelligence-led and deployed to specific locations in London," the city's Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

"Intelligence-led," says the agency that has so far only managed to incorrectly identify people almost 100% of the time. There's more "intelligence" further on in the article when the Met says the software that's hardly managed to correctly identify people will help "identify and apprehend suspects." Gun and knife crime top the list of things expected to be curtailed by unproven tech, followed by the sexual abuse of children and "protecting the vulnerable."

Also lol a bit at this, which uses a trite phrase made even triter by the abysmal performance of the Met's AI:

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave said in a statement: "We are using a tried-and-tested technology, and have taken a considered and transparent approach in order to arrive at this point."

He's technically correct. It's has been tried and tested. What it hasn't been is accurate and that's what counts most when people's rights and freedoms are on the line. But better an unknown number of innocent people be misidentified than allow a single suspect to go unscanned, I guess.

Filed Under: facial recognition, london, metropolitan police, police

London Metropolitan Police's Facial Recognition System Is Now Only Misidentifying People 81% Of The Time

from the any-year-now... dept

The London Metropolitan Police's spectacular run of failure continues. Sky News reports the latest data shows the Met's facial recognition tech is still better at fucking up than doing what it says on the tin.

Researchers found that the controversial system is 81% inaccurate - meaning that, in the vast majority of cases, it flagged up faces to police when they were not on a wanted list.

Needless to say, this has raised "significant concerns" by the sort of people most likely to be concerned about false positives. Needless to say, this does not include the London Metropolitan Police, which continues to deploy this tech despite its only marginally-improved failure rate.

In 2018, it was reported the Metropolitan Police's tech was misidentifying people at an astounding 100% rate. False positives were apparently the only thing the system was capable of. Things had improved by May 2019, bringing the Met's false positive rate down to 96%. The sample size was still pretty small, meaning this had a negligible effect on the possibility of the Metropolitan Police rounding up the unusual suspects the system claimed were the usual suspects.

Perhaps this should be viewed as a positive development, but when a system has only managed to work its way up to being wrong 81% of the time, we should probably hold our applause until the end of the presentation.

As it stands now, the tech is better at being wrong than identifying criminals. But what's just as concerning is the Met's unshaken faith in its failing tech. It defends its facial recognition software with stats that are literally unbelievable.

The Met police insists its technology makes an error in only one in 1,000 instances, but it hasn’t shared its methodology for arriving at that statistic.

This much lower error rate springs from Metropolitan Police's generous accounting of its facial recognition program. Its method compares successful and unsuccessful matches with the total number of faces processed. That's how it arrives at a failure rate that sounds much, much better than a system that is far more often wrong than right.

No matter which math is used, it's not acceptable to deploy tech that's wrong so often when the public is routinely stripped of its agency by secret discussions and quiet rollouts. Here in the US, two cities have banned this tech, citing its unreliability and the potential harms caused by its deployment. Out in London, law enforcement has never been told "No." A city covered by cameras is witnessing surveillance mission creep utilizing notoriously unreliable tech.

The tech is being challenged in court by Big Brother Watch, which points out that every new report of the tech's utter failure only strengthens its case. Government officials, however, aren't so sure. And by "not so sure," I mean, "mired in deep denial."

The Home Office defended the Met, telling Sky News: "We support the police as they trial new technologies to protect the public, including facial recognition, which can help them identity criminals.

But it clearly does not do that.

It misidentifies people as criminals, which isn't even remotely close to "identifying criminals." It's the exact opposite and it's going to harm London residents. And the government offers nothing but shrugs and empty assurances of public safety.

Filed Under: accuracy, facial recognition, london, metropolitan police, privacy, surveillance

London Metropolitan Police Deploy Facial Recognition Tech Sporting A 100% Failure Rate

from the TOP.-TECH. dept

Facial recognition tech isn't working quite as well as the agencies deploying it have hoped, but failure after failure hasn't stopped them from rolling out the tech just the same. I guess the only way to improve this "product" is to keep testing it on live subjects in the hope that someday it will actually deliver on advertised accuracy.

The DHS is shoving it into airports -- putting both international and domestic travelers at risk of being deemed terrorists by tech that just isn't quite there yet. In the UK -- the Land of Cameras -- facial recognition tech is simply seen as the logical next step in the nation's sprawling web o' surveillance. And Amazon is hoping US law enforcement wants to make facial rec tech as big a market for it as cloud services and online sales.

Thanks to its pervasiveness across the pond, the UK is where we're getting most of our data on the tech's successes. Well... we haven't seen many successes. But we are getting the data. And the data indicates a growing threat -- not to the UK public from terrorists or criminals, but to the UK public from its own government.

London cops have been slammed for using unmarked vans to test controversial and inaccurate automated facial recognition technology on Christmas shoppers.

The Metropolitan Police are deploying the tech today and tomorrow in three of the UK capital's tourist hotspots: Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Leicester Square.

The tech is basically a police force on steroids -- capable of demanding ID from thousands of people per minute. Big Brother Watch says the Metro tech can scan 300 faces per second, running them against hot lists of criminal suspects. The difference is no one's approaching citizens to demand they identify themselves. The software does all the legwork and citizens have only one way to opt out: stay home.

Given these results, staying home might just be the best bet.

In May, a Freedom of Information request from Big Brother Watch showed the Met's facial recog had a 98 per cent false positive rate.

The group has now said that a subsequent request found that 100 per cent of the so-called matches since May have been incorrect.

A recent report from Cardiff University questioned the technology's abilities in low light and crowds – which doesn't bode well for a trial in some of the busiest streets in London just days before the winter solstice.

The tech isn't cheap, but even if it was, it still wouldn't be providing any return on investment. To be fair, the software isn't misidentifying people hundreds of times a second. In a great majority of scans, nothing is returned at all. The public records response shows the Metro Police racked up five false positives during their June 28th deployment. This led to one stop of a misidentified individual.

But even if the number of failures is small compared to the number of faces scanned, the problem is far from minimal. 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. We don't know how many scans the police performed in total. We don't know how many of these scans are retained and what the government does with all this biometric data it's collecting. About all we can tell is the deployment led to zero arrests and one stop instigated by a false positive. That may be OK for a test run (it isn't) but it doesn't bode well for the full-scale deployment the Met Police have planned.

The public doesn't get to opt out of this pervasive scanning. Worse, it doesn't even get to opt in. There's no public discussion period for cop tech even though, in the case of mass scanning systems, the public is by far the largest stakeholder. Instead, the public is left to fend for itself as law enforcement agencies deploy additional surveillance methods -- not against targeted suspects, but against the populace as a whole. This makes the number of failures unacceptable, even if the number is a very small percentage of the whole.

Filed Under: facial recognition, london, metropolitan police

London's Metropolitan Police Houses A Bunch Of Criminals Who Are More Interested In Harassing Journalists Than Chasing Criminals

from the Keystone-Kops-UK dept

The International Business Times has just published a useful set of crime stats -- the number of criminal offenses committed by UK police officers over the past five years. So far, regular criminal activity still outpaces criminal activity by police officers, but this fact is a little jarring.

One police officer is arrested each day on suspicion of criminal offences in the UK, according to data from 43 polices forces across England and Wales.

IBT says 1,629 officers have been arrested over the past five years -- roughly 300 a year. 500 of those have been convicted or suspended. A majority of the arrests apparently stem from sexual offenses.

But perhaps the most criminal-laden police force of all is the Metropolitan Police. When not abusing the law to investigate journalists, this police force engages in a significant amount of criminal behavior. Roughly half of the arrested officers over the past five years came from the Met.

The Metropolitan Police saw 781 officers arrested, and 146 convicted or cautioned, during the period the figures covered. The rate means 1-in-40 of the Met's officers were arrested in the last five years, and 1-in-200 were convicted of a crime.

1-in-40. That's an amazingly high ratio, considering these officers are (supposedly) in the business of law enforcement. They could possibly be as bad than the people they police. The Met's crime stats show reportable criminal offenses occurring at a rate of one offense for every 12 London residents. However, it's very likely that several of these reportable offenses were committed by the same people, which would bring the rate of criminal-to-noncriminal London residents within shouting distance of the Met's horrendous 1-in-40 rate.

It's not that we expect our police officers to have a more refined moral compass than the general public… oh, wait, WE DO. One-in-forty is a terrible ratio for people who took a job that explicitly expects them to not only enforce the law, but follow it as well.

And, on top of that, the Met is apparently far too busy using the UK's terrorism laws to conduct surveillance on investigative reporters to devote much time to its other, less questionable duties.

According to the Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Met is also the worst-performing force for solving burglaries from people's homes in 2013-14. The Met caught offenders in 11% of burglaries, against a national average of 15.5%, according to the HMIC.

The lesson is: if you don't want the Met on your tail, you're better off breaking into houses than filing FOI requests.

Filed Under: criminals, london, metropolitan police, police

Chilling Effects: UK Police Admit To Investigating Journalists For Covering Snowden Leaks

from the freedom-of-the-press? dept

Remember back when UK law enforcement detained David Miranda while he passing through Heathrow airport for nine hours, under an anti-terrorism law, claiming that journalism could be terrorism? Apparently, UK law enforcement is really doubling down on that claim, with the new admission that there is an ongoing and open criminal investigation into the reporters who have published Snowden documents.

As you recall, the first such documents were obtained and published by Glenn Greenwald, an American living in Brazil but working for the UK's Guardian newspaper. There had been a number of bizarre reports about just how far UK law enforcement wanted to go to intimidate journalists from reporting on such leaks in the future -- even forcing the Guardian to physically destroy a laptop that had the Snowden documents for no good reason other than security theater.

But that kind of intimidation has been taken up a notch. Greenwald's new publication, the Intercept, has been engaged in an ongoing Freedom of Information battle with the Metropolitan Police Service in the UK to find out if that organization is investigating journalists, and the police have finally confirmed that they are, in fact, investigating journalists, though it only does so obliquely, but "confirming" that "it continues to conduct an investigation into the events as described above" (with the "above" being the details laid out in the Freedom of Information request).

Of course, it doesn't appear that the reporters actually did anything wrong, and thus it seems fairly clear that the entire reason for the investigation is to create chilling effects for journalists who might publish such stories in the future and to harass those who published them in the past. The current UK government's continued move to use Orwell's 1984 as a guidebook, rather than a warning sign, is really reaching ridiculous levels.

Filed Under: ed snowden, glenn greenwald, investigation, journalism, metropolitan police, uk

UK Police Can't Confirm Or Deny Investigation Of Journalists It Publicly Confirmed In 2013

from the Glomar-logic dept

If you're a UK-based journalist who's reported on the Snowden leaks, it's safe to say you're under investigation. Not only are you being investigated, but that investigation itself is so secret, it can't be discussed. The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher sent a Freedom of Information request to London's Metropolitan Police (the Met) for more information about the investigation -- something twice publicly confirmed by Met representatives.

But when asked specifically for information on the ongoing investigation, the agency had nothing to say.

[T]he Metropolitan Police... says everything about the investigation’s existence is a secret and too dangerous to disclose. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from this reporter, the force has repeatedly refused to release any information about the status of the investigation, how many officers are working on it, or how much taxpayer money has been spent on it. The Met wrote in its response:

"to confirm or deny whether we hold any information concerning any current or previous investigations into the alleged actions of Edward Snowden could potentially be misused proving detrimental to national security.'

In this current environment, where there is a possibility of increased threat of terrorist activity, providing any details even to confirm or deny that any information exists could assist any group or persons who wish to cause harm to the people of the nation which would undermine the safeguarding of national security."

The response is hardly a response. In fact, almost the entirety of the nine-page document Gallagher received is simply reasons WHY the Met won't be responding affirmatively or negatively to his inquiry. The only new information gleaned is that control of the investigation has changed hands.

AC Mark Rowley has taken over as Head of Specialist Operations following the departure of Cressida Dick

That's the one thing the "Counter Terrorism Command" can confirm. This would be the same department within the Met that was directly involved with the detainment and questioning of Glenn Greenwald's partner, David Miranda. Everything else falls under a variety of exemptions, including the oh-so-opaque "state secrets" designation.

The Metropolitan Police Service can neither confirm nor deny whether it holds any of the information that you have requested, as the duty in S1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not apply, by virtue of the following exemptions:

Section 23(5) - Information supplied by, or concerning, certain security bodies
Section 24(2) - National Security
Section 30(3) Criminal Investigations
Section 31(3) - Law Enforcement
Section 40(5) - Personal information

There's more detail later, when the response details the agency's decision to declare the request to be "not in the public interest."

The security of the country is of paramount importance and the Police service will not divulge whether information is or is not held if to do so would undermine National Security or law enforcement. Whilst there is a public interest in the transparency of policing operations and providing assurance that the police service is appropriately and effectively engaging with the threats posed by groups or individuals there is a very strong public interest in safeguarding the integrity of police investigations and operations in the highly sensitive area of extremism, crime prevention, public disorder and terrorism prevention.

[...]

After weighing up the competing interests I have determined that confirmation or denial of any information being held concerning whether the MPS has investigated the alleged actions of Edward Snowden or not would not be in the public interest. To confirm or deny that information is held regarding any individual or investigation that may or may not have taken place could be detrimental to any investigations that may be being conducted now or in the future.

But, of course, all of this discussion about national security, public interest and possibly compromised investigations does not confirm that there's a twice-previously-confirmed investigation of UK journalists in progress.

However, this should not be taken as necessarily indicating that any information that would meet your request exists or does not exist.

This UK-style Glomar tosses the request back to The Intercept, which has tossed it to the nearest governing body..

The Intercept has filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the public body that enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws, about the Met’s refusal to release information about the current status of the investigation. The commissioner will now look at how the police handled the request and decide whether they should be ordered to hand over the relevant details.

Even in the UK, information doesn't want to be free. It wants to be litigated.

The Met continues to maintain its code of silence in the face of its earlier public statements about investigating those publishing the Snowden leaks. When asked how something the agency itself publicly discussed several months ago is now a "national security" issue, the Met offered a swift "no comment" -- a handy way to dodge the logic hole in its Freedom of Information request denial.

Filed Under: ed snowden, foia, investigation, metropolitan police, police, reporting, uk

Metropolitan Police Says They're 'Not Prepared' To Reveal How Often They Abuse Anti-Terror Law To Spy On Journalists

from the must-take-a-lot-of-time-to-count-'em-all-up dept

So we recently wrote about how the Metropolitan Police in the UK abused an anti-terror law, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), to dig into a journalist's phone records without any judicial oversight as the police sought to minimize a scandal relating to an incident (Plebgate) involving the police. That led many to wonder just how often the police abuse that law to get records from journalists with no oversight. The answer appears to be "screw you, we're not saying." Or the equivalent of that with a friendly British accent:

Asked how many times they have used Ripa to seize telephone or email records belonging to journalists, Scotland Yard said: “We are not prepared to discuss.”

The line between "not prepared" and "oh fuck, we don't have to reveal that, do we?" appears to be fairly blurry.

Filed Under: journalists, metropolitan police, privacy, ripa, scotland yard, surveillance