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Writer's pictureEditor Darren Birks

Met Police using Coronation to do Biggest Live Facial Recognition Operation Ever Outside China


The Met Police are using the Coronation to do the biggest live facial recognition operation in history outside of China.


The Metropolitan police are using the King's Coronation to gather thousands of people's biometric data, against their permission, or even knowledge, and if you object you are liable to arrest.


Whilst tens of thousands of people pour into the Mall for King Charles' coronation, the Metropolitan police will be scooping up their biometric data to be stored indefinitely on an AI database.


The Coronation is seen as the perfect opportunity for a mass data-gathering operation. All under the pretext of security the Artificial Intelligence system is able to record, log, and categorize hundreds of people simultaneously, something not achievable prior to the new system.


Big Brother Watch, who have been campaigning about the system, state:

"We’re fighting to urgently stop facial recognition surveillance from being used in our public spaces, whether by police or private companies."

"Live facial recognition in public spaces is a mass surveillance method and a huge expansion of the surveillance state. It inverts the vital democratic principle of suspicion preceding surveillance, treating populations like suspects."

"Police normally require a legal basis to check your identity or ask for your biometric data. But facial recognition surveillance introduces arbitrary identity checks to our society, turning us into walking ID cards subject to high-tech police lineups. This poses a major threat to our civil liberties and democratic rights – we must resist it."


Reference databases have been built from various sources including:

  • CCTV images of “suspects” or “problem” individuals

  • Subsets of the police’s enormous database of 19 million custody images, which includes vast numbers of photos of innocent people

  • police intelligence databases, including innocent people with suspected mental health problems and political campaigners

Tens of millions of people in the UK have been SCANNED already. Police, shopping centres, concerts, museums, stadiums, bars have been found to have used the surveillance software and already have a record of thousands of innocent people. There is no law for facial recognition in the UK.


Met Police facial recognition system in trials was 86% inaccurate and yet it is still being rolled out as their 'flagship' crime-detection system. Since Met's system went live over 3,000 people have been wrongly identified by police using the software. If you are attending the coronation tomorrow, you will be captured on the Met's database.


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