WE’RE CAUGHT IN A LOSE-LOSE SITUATION IN THE MODERN MEDIA WORLD: REFUSAL LESSENS OUR REACH, ENGAGING SETS US UP AS TARGETS ~ Rob Ray ~ A couple of friends of mine, hailing from an end of the anarchist scene where skipping and shoplifting are more common, were telling me about their experiences from this venerable part of the rebel lifestyle recently. It’s a time-honoured part of hunting dinner in the bowels of big supermarkets that the greatest flaw in even the best security systems has always been bored minimum-wage night staff whose class consciousness extends, at the very least, to not giving a single solitary wossit about some snacks and a tinny galloping out the door. The theatrically rolled eye, or a muttered “at least wait until my back’s turned” has been the saviour of many a struggling person. As with so much of our daily lives now, however, the rollout of not just CCTV but facial recognition technology is making itself known. Usually using the excuse of a “devastating wave of shoplifting” that’s “driving supermarkets out of the area.” This unpitying, inhuman eye does not roll, it simply reports directly up the chain, to someone whose actual class (worker) is blurred by their designation (manager). An unpaid, ever-vigilant quisling following the poor round the store. We’re filmed through almost every aspect of our public lives now, with both the State and private business rapidly converting the results into databases which, as the recent unpopular move towards a centralised ID system suggests, are only a stone’s throw from being amalgamated. For law and order purposes, naturally. As a result of this techno-stool pigeon’s spread, my friends were finding, a ban from one major store had become more easily enforced across all related properties. They were automatically flagged. Another few pounds saved for the bottom-line profit of the billionaire class. Later, away in another wing of the movement, I was reminded of this observation while listening to a talk by reps of Campaign Against Police Surveillance (COPS) and Police Spies Out of Lives. They were explaining their experiences dealing with spycops who had infiltrated so many of the left’s political movements throughout the 20th and early 21st century. For anarchists, particularly those active in the environmental movement of the 1990s and 2000s, the officers who infiltrated their communities were a particular horror. They started relationships with women and even had kids with them purely as cover for forms of petty snooping which, as the inquiry has revealed, amounted to little more than coppers pathetically cosplaying the spy game. Infamously, while the inquiry ground on over the years, legislation was brought in not to restrain, but to enable, similar behaviour in future. After seven years of slowly leaking revelations and a mountain of evidence that it couldn’t be trusted to follow even the most basic ethical standards, the Met was gifted the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021. It allows any police force, security service branch and every other major agency up to and including the Food Standards Authority to break laws if it brings in “intelligence.” What this should tell any reasonably-minded person is that the State is not a responsible body. It does not care about the safety of the public, but instead is quite happy to endanger it for the sake of knowing what non-violent dissenters are up to. And the irony? They may not even need it, for the most part. Because similar to skipping and shoplifting, it is technology, rather than sex-offending liars, which now provides their primary method of surveillance. Handing spycops total impunity to exploit the families of the bereaved, like Stephen Lawrence, is a bastard’s bonanza enacted just on the off-chance, in case they ever feel the need to rape their way to some extra data. In-person spying is in many ways less powerful and a lot more expensive than getting yourself added to a messaging group and just feeding the whole thing into a database for later sorting. You can discover networks of support for a given organisation simply by filtering through their social media followers. Cameras and mics no longer need to be laboriously installed in likely places, they’re everywhere, being sorted and catalogued by increasingly clever large language models (marketed as AI). Which isn’t to say it won’t happen, especially if dealing with a savvy group, but technology has made watching us, every step and finger swipe, every day, in many ways trivial. What’s remarkable is how weak opposition to it really is. NGOs do the usual liberal thing, lefties have been quite slow on the uptake outside of the everyday grind of protest, and of course, no parliamentary party has shown any interest in making the law less onerous. In fact the grouping which has been most vocal about civil liberties in the media is probably the far-right, which, for all its huffing and puffing about free speech, has little to no quarrel with the core functionality of government intrusion. What victory is it to secure Graham Linehan’s right to be an obsessive, self-destructive bully without let or hindrance when the State is busily drawing to itself all the apparatus of a surveillance state in the sort of granular detail Orwell could never have foreseen? They have had nothing to say about – or have been joyously in favour of – the extension of repressive legislation and policy against left-wing targets. Most notable is Palestine Action, but prior laws and policing priorities aiming to take out the non-violent climate actionists of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil met with a similar shrug/jeer response. It’s only when their own are threatened, or in service of a rhetorical bete noir (universities), that they suddenly discover their freedom-loving backbone. The truth of where Reform and its fellow travellers are going with this can be seen in the US, where it has taken a matter of months for the far-right to utilise all that power to purge the public sector, academia, and media of perceived enemies. The social media presences of everyone from judges to teachers to generals has been pored over for years by the MAGA grassroots, more efficiently by the likes of the Heritage Foundation and its allies, and in bulk by tech barons such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel, as they sucked in endless data across various platforms. And now, with Trump at the helm, these once relatively latent forces, easily augmented by the powerful tools of the State, have been used as, effectively, a giant shopping list of people to be hounded out of key roles and replaced with loyalists to the cause. Visitors and students who show solidarity with Palestine are not just censured, but jailed and deported. Migrants are tracked and deported. Where supermarkets and activist surveillance go today in Britain, so broad civil society goes tomorrow via the landslide-in-the-making of Reform UK, or perhaps slightly more slowly through the grinding decay of technocrats. We have several difficulties dealing with this situation, especially in the event that the far-right gain power and feel emboldened enough to volte face completely on their “principles.” To start, much of the damage is already done. Few of us are entirely without footprint giving our opinions on social media – and indeed if we were we’d be caught the other way. Because despite all their carping, the far-right have very few real barriers to saying exactly what they want any more – egregious racists are actively welcomed in serious positions in the major parties – and we already have problems countering their reach. A wholesale abandonment of social media would be an abandonment of its hostage public to algorithmic pipelines leading straight to Andrew Tate or, worse, Robert Jenrick. But in presenting our own cases in the era of Tiktok and Instagram, we are expected to show faces, in public. To record our voices. To not do so by wearing masks or Anon-styled faceless screens usually restricts the audience, largely, to fellow-travellers and topics where masking up is considered logical. Which rather defeats the purpose of outreach, except as a recruitment tool for the already-interested – one that is in the hands of the very people we’re supposed to be resisting. So we’re caught in a lose-lose situation in the modern media world. Refusal lessens our reach, engaging sets us up as targets. What is to be done? What strategies can we work with? If engagement is necessary, how do we protect ourselves? Present ourselves? There is AI which can very effectively throw a realistic virtual mask over recorded videos – providing the expected friendly face. Deepfaking behind a VPN on a throwaway account? Grim, but plausible. And then the task of building our own media is always there, more important than ever as a means of locking identities away from the snoopers. Freedom is just one of several online media projects which are all understaffed and constantly in need of help – not just the odd bit here or there, but joining up with an understanding that the project is going to be long and difficult, and will be fighting to get heard over the noise. Finally there is the offline. Away from facial recognition cameras. The communities we live in. The analogue way may be the most important of all, the only one they won’t have access to, the hardest to infiltrate. The future of resistance, using the oldest methods. Much of the resilience we need to build has to happen in short order. If Trump’s ascension is any sort of guide to the ambitions of Reform, we will not simply be needing a better, more joined-up form of prisoner support but mechanisms to fight purges of progressive voices from every walk of life, or at least to help such Official Cancellations with support, and an entryway into effective resistance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was originally published in the Winter 2025-26 issue of Freedom anarchist journal. Public domain image by VideoGirl The post A wall of electronic eyes replacing human feeling appeared first on Freedom News.

ALGORITHMS, FACIAL RECOGNITION, AND TIGHTENING PROTEST LAWS SIGNAL A DEEPENING SURVEILLANCE STATE ~ Blade Runner ~ The UK is expanding its use of predictive policing and surveillance, framing it as a response to crime, protest, and public safety. But the direction is clear: more monitoring, earlier intervention, and more control over dissent. In early April, The Guardian revealed that the Ministry of Justice is developing a “murder prevention” system. The tool aims to identify individuals judged to be at high risk of committing lethal violence, based on data drawn from multiple agencies—social care, policing, education. The government has framed the project as a research initiative to improve risk assessments and early intervention. But its underlying logic marks a shift toward ‘precrime’—managing individuals on the basis of what they might do, rather than what they’ve done. The comparison to Minority Report—Philip K. Dick’s 1956 story, later adapted into a 2002 film—is hard to avoid. In both, people are flagged not by witnesses or evidence, but by prediction systems that turn patterns into verdicts. Dick’s vision included ‘precogs’—human oracles housed by the state—while today’s version relies on datasets and AI algorithms. In both, the future is treated as knowable, and the present is shaped around managing that future in advance. Notably, overall crime rates in England and Wales have been falling for decades. According to the Office for National Statistics, incidents have dropped from nearly 20 million in the mid-1990s to under 5 million in recent years. Homicide levels have followed a similar decline, with 594 recorded in the year ending March 2021—far below their peak in the early 2000s. Only 35 of those involved firearms. The relative rarity of such violence raises questions about why a predictive “murder prevention” system is being pursued now. At the same time, police forces face severe financial pressure. The Metropolitan Police is planning to cut 1,700 officers and staff to cover a £260 million budget gap. Other forces face similar cuts. But rather than scaling back, policing is being reorganised—away from visible presence and toward data-driven surveillance, algorithmic profiling, and anticipatory enforcement. The Crime and Policing Bill 2025 reinforces this direction. It allows police to access DVLA-held driver licence records for law enforcement purposes. While the Home Office denies any link to facial recognition, civil liberties groups have raised concerns that this access could be repurposed—effectively turning the DVLA database into a foundation for real-time identification. Combined with surveillance networks already active in shops, housing estates, and transport hubs, this lays the groundwork for a more integrated system of biometric tracking, with limited transparency or oversight. These tools are disproportionately deployed in working-class areas and are consistently shown to disproportionately misidentify Black and Brown individuals. In August 2024, following a series of racist attacks across England, Prime Minister Keir Starmer proposed the expanded use of live facial recognition technology (LFR) as part of the government’s response. Civil liberties groups, including Statewatch, condemned the move, warning that it would further entrench surveillance and racialised policing. In an open letter, over two dozen organisations argued that the UK risks becoming “an outlier in the democratic world” by embracing a technology with no explicit legal basis, widespread inaccuracy, and discriminatory impacts. Critics noted that the government’s response to racist violence focused not on addressing its causes, but on expanding state power over already over-policed communities. The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unrest. UK military operations abroad—most recently joint airstrikes in Yemen—raise the likelihood of retaliatory attacks. Surveillance systems originally developed for counter-terrorism are now being used to monitor social movements and suppress political disruption. Recent protest laws support this shift. The Public Order Act and related legislation criminalise slow marches, locking-on, and disruption to infrastructure. These laws were drafted in response to climate protests from groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. Often operating without strong ties to other struggles—like labour, housing or anti-racist organising—these campaigns were easier to isolate and criminalise. The resulting legal framework now stands ready for broader use. The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.  Risk scoring, biometric surveillance, and protest restrictions are being embedded into law and infrastructure. These powers are built to be extended—to trade unionists, migrant organisers, housing activists, and anyone seen to disrupt the smooth functioning of a society of control. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image by Rasmus The post How the UK is shaping a future of Precrime and dissent management appeared first on Freedom News.