Masking protest: AI-enabled surveillance is a global ID issue for law enforcement

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner Biometrically speaking, our faces don’t give much away.

But advances in AI-enabled biometric surveillance are raising important questions about ID globally – and not just for the protestors.

Policing public space is different.

Much has been said about this aspect of policing protests, but concealment of ID runs both ways.

However, the citizen now has access to biometric surveillance technology, reverse lookup algorithms and tools that only recently were the preserve of state intelligence agents: they are powerful, sinister and fallible.