The New Dark Age

In a recent conversation with Tony Blair, home secretary Shabana Mahmoud boasted that her vision for the UK has always been a “panopticon”.

The conversation took place at a Tony Blair Institute event. This is noteworthy because the Tony Blair Institute has been behind the push for digital ID and digital currency, along with its billionaire backers, such as Larry Ellison (the guy who is heavily censoring TikTok to the point where political videos have vanished from your feed and you can’t even post the word “Epstein”).

Mahmoud must have forgot the cameras were rolling because a panopticon is a system where prisoners are watched at all times to enforce self-discipline. It is an 18th-century concept that was considered too cruel to be introduced at the time. It was later popularised by philosopher Michel Foucault as a metaphor for modern societies.

Panopticon is total surveillance. Totalitarianism. It is the home secretary’s vision for the UK for which she makes “no apologies”. And before you accuse me of hyperbole, here are her exact words:

“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”

The home secretary just came out and said it. You are all under suspicion. You will soon be watched at all times.

The UK government is investing £140 million in a new AI centre, moving surveillance technologies from trial phase into full implementation. Alarmingly, AI will be responsible for the equivalent workload of 3,000 police officers.

The home secretary plans to increase the number of facial recognition vans across England and Wales five-fold to match biometric data against watchlists in real time. It is a crime to hide your face from these vans, meaning facial scanning is mandatory and often happening without your knowledge. Facial recognition is widely used in London where the Metropolitan Police have scanned millions of faces without consent.

The government argues such technology is “necessary for policing in the digital age”, but why is it necessary? Why did the government suddenly need to scan everyone’s faces? It seems the moment totalitarianism became possible, they insisted lack of freedom is good actually.

It’s worth remembering facial recognition is not just a government thing. Many people are finding themselves banned from every store in the UK that operates the Facewatch system. Anyone accused can find themselves cut off from parts of society without due process. They are not even made aware until a security guard humiliates them in public when they go shopping. There are already many cases of misidentification.

Disturbingly, the home secretary wants to use technology such as facial recognition and AI to ensure the state has eyes everywhere at all times. Mahmoud recently said in a BBC interview:

“Let me say I make no apology for rolling out this technology… What I would say to people that are very motivated by sort of campaigning on civil liberties is that you can’t enjoy any of your liberties in any country if you’re not safe.”

A liberty is quite literally freedom from government interference. We have enjoyed liberties up until now without mass surveillance technologies, but we must suddenly reduce the number of liberties in order for us to enjoy our liberties? How the hell does this make sense?

A perfect example of how surveillance technologies can go horribly wrong would be ICE in the US. ICE has been using AI to scour social media, build up databases, create dossiers, and identify areas to target.

Everyone in a targeted area, including children, gets harassed and intimidated by masked men who don’t have to identify themselves. We are talking about ICE agents turning up at schools and churches and workplaces and stopping vehicles and making warrantless entries into homes.

ICE agents have been using facial scanners powered by the Mobile Fortify app and Clearview AI to identify possible illegal immigrants, only the technology has been identifying fully documented immigrants and US citizens.

Americans are being told to have their papers ready (which is authoritarian in itself), but even if they show their papers, they are often taken into detention. Let’s not mention the violence and murders being carried out by ICE because that is a whole other article…

ICE is a perfect example of what happens when state power gets out of control. It should serve as a warning that the West is heading in a dark direction.

When Shabana Mahmoud spoke of “being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals”, she meant it quite literally. Predictive policing is the new thing tech bros have come up with for us. It means gathering data on everyone and using predictive analytics to figure out who is most likely to commit a crime.

The UK has seen predictive policing pilots across 14 police forces over the last decade or so, using tech from companies such as Palantir to identify “risk signals”. Let’s not forget that Palantir helps Israel to monitor and kill Palestinians. Isn’t that reassuring?

Another company providing our government with surveillance tech is Corsight AI which happens to be based in Israel. Now would be a good time to familiarise yourself with the term “imperial boomerang”.

“The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.” Wikipedia

Now imagine if your government imposed digital IDs and currency and had everyone’s biometrics on file. This would mean facial recognition cameras could feed your movements into a centralised database which could include your social media habits, associates, purchases, and any dirt the government has on you.

While the government has backed down on digital ID for now, don’t assume this is going away. Too much money and effort has been invested for the oligarchs to give up. The government is introducing a voluntary system for right-to-work checks, but the problem is not many will use it, which is interesting, given we are told this is about “convenience”. If it was convenient, surely everyone would rush out to get their digital ID, right?

The government knows no one wants digital ID, but it is looking at how to get as many people using it as possible. One approach being considered is a voluntary smart phone app for children. Clearly, they want to coax in youngsters to phase in digital ID through the back door.

Instead of making digital ID a legal requirement, social media and websites could soon require it. The app for children would eventually become an app for everyone for your “convenience”. That way the government can harvest your data, but argue it is not forcing you to participate, and over time, the number of things you need the app for will increase.

The pieces are coming together to create a 1984 / Minority Report-style society: digital IDs, digital currencies, age verification, facial recognition, surveillance drones, social media monitoring, predictive algorithms, AI-powered behaviour recognition and anomaly spotting, which includes analysing your gait, emotional state, and voice patterns.

The British government is establishing a National Police Service to ”centralise tech procurement” and focus on these “advanced tools”. We are told the NPS will form a “single, stronger national law enforcement body”. It will be responsible for buying new technologies, such as facial recognition, on behalf of all police forces to help tackle “serious crimes”. Given we live in a time when protesting in a wheelchair is considered terrorism, the mind boggles.

The home secretary insists we have a chance to make policing more “pro-active”, explaining:

“We will create a new National Police Service – dubbed ‘the British FBI’ – deploying world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology to track down and catch dangerous criminals.”

Mahmoud describes the NPS as “the British FBI”, which is suspicious because we already have MI5 and the National Crime Agency. Don’t worry though, we need another three-letter agency to “streamline” policing. It looks like the NPS is going to be the Thought Police and Pre-Crime Division rolled into one. I can only imagine what “risk signals” it will identify in my writing…

If you thought it was bad that you can’t express an opinion on social media without being accused of terrorism, it seems a matter of time until you are arrested because the predictive algorithm has flagged you as high risk. It seems far-fetched until you remember police are visiting people to warn them about entirely legal social media posts, sorry, I mean “non-crime hate incidents”.

The time to push back is now. We won a partial climb down on digital IDs because we pushed back hard and raised public awareness, but the fight is far from over. You need to understand that once the panopticon is in place, there is no breaking out. We will wake up one day to find we are in a prison from which there is no escape because they will have total control.