Technology will be trialled at defence related sites in Britain
Andy Burnham’s government has found a new way to crack down on our right to protest, using artificial intelligence from Ukraine.
When Burnham visited Ukraine’s capital Kiev, he handed over blueprints to help it produce Storm Shadow missiles. And the British state in turn received access to Ukraine’s “Avengers” artificial intelligence database of battlefield information.
The state says it wants to protect critical infrastructure from attacks from hostile states. This includes military bases, power plants, airports and now also data centres.
The system will work through buried fibre optic cables that will be able to detect people’s movements. It will be trained using information from Ukraine to detect Russian sabotage attempts.
It could just as easily be used to target anti-arms or environmental activist groups. The state doesn’t want a repeat of the break-in at Brize Norton airbase that led to Palestine Action being proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
And private companies will be able to access the data if they are approved by the Ministry of Defence.
One of the companies that will implement this new form of surveillance is Bristol-based firm Sintela.
Sintela has also recently began a partnership with the Donald Trump administration in the US to help it crack down on migrants by detecting people trying to cross borders.
In the United States mass surveillance is already being rolled out. Flock surveillance cameras—that can stalk individuals—are spreading rapidly throughout US cities. They’re being used by Ice to crack down on migrants and have already been used by cops to stalk partners and ex-partners.
Local resistance has forced 100 US cities to turn off their flock cameras.
In Britain the Labour government has already begun implementing dystopian facial recognition technology including on the London Underground. At this year’s Notting Hill Carnival the Metropolitan Police plans to ramp up its use of facial recognition. This would track and save images of millions of people celebrating at the multi-racial festival.
This will lead to more racist arrests. Facial recognition has known issues around false-positives with people with darker skin tones.
We have to resist this dystopian technology and defend the right to protest.
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