After months of pre-publicity, at least two television documentaries and even the front page of the Daily Mail, the London Borough of Newham's Face Recognition system has gone live on October 14th 1998.
The system is in addition to Newham's 140 CCTV street cameras and 11 mobile radio linked units that are already in operation.
Real Audio soundbites of interviews with Councillor Ian Corbett, Chair of Newham Council’s Environment Department and Chief Supt Dave Armond, divisional commander for Forest Gate and Stratford, the Metropolitan policeman in charge of this experiment are available on the BBC website
According to their press release, Newham Council are choosing to disregard the Data Protection Act with this system, although many of Newham's other systems, less intrusive to the public, are registered.
"Under the Data Protection Act, personal information will not be held on the Face Recognition system only photographs and Police reference numbers."
However, this is being somewhat "economical with the truth", as the unfortunately named Mandrake system, developed in the UK by Software and Systems International, is based on neural network face recognition technology from Visionics in the USA. You can download a Windows95/NT demonstration screensaver from Visionics which will work with popuar webcameras e.g. Connectix Quickcam.
Inevitably the pattern matching process is not 100% accurate, so there is a reasonable chance of mis-identification of innocent people as "suspects". The demonstration screensaver, shows how "near matches" are also stored , logged and time & date stamped automatically.
The database of suspects is to be supplied by the Metroplitan Police, but there are no details about the rules and procedures for updating this database. Are new suspects simply added continually ? When, if ever, does a suspect come off the Mandrake suspect list ? If there are just photos and reference numbers, how are the council camera operators meant to distinguish between, say, petty criminals and terrorists ?
Technically, the Mandrake system could be used to feed "suspect" photos and movement patterns back to the police or other agencies or the council could sell the results to commercial companies. Where are the rules and procedures that govern this ?
Remember, this system is not intended to rapidly identify known criminals after they have been arrested, but to target people simply walking down the public street.
Newham Council is one of the "winners" of the 1998 Privacy International Big Brother Awards