UK government to expand facial ID to fight rioters - will it work?

• Anti-immigrant riots sweep across Britain
• Prime minister calls to expand facial recognition
• Digital groups express privacy concerns

LONDON - Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence has swept Britain following the deaths of three young girls in a knife attack.

Approximately 400 people have been arrested during the week-long riots, the first widespread outbreak of violence in the country for 13 years.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the police will crack down on those causing the destruction, while the head of the National Police Chiefs' Council, Gavin Stephens, has said police would expand the use of tools such as live facial recognition.

But online rights groups have expressed concern that greater surveillance will not address the root causes of the disorder and have raised concerns about consent and data privacy.

What prompted the riots?

The riots began after three girls were killed in a knife attack in Southport, northwest England, last week.

Despite the police saying that the attack was not terrorism-related and that the suspect was born in Britain, misinformation spread on social media suggesting falsely that the teenager charged was a radical Islamist migrant.

Riots broke out in Southport while people also gathered outside Downing Street in London in the hours after the attack.

The crowds chanted "save our kids", "we want our country back" and a slogan of the previous Conservative government, "stop the boats".

Riots and disorder then spread across the country, with violence in cities such as Liverpool, Bristol, Hull, Rotherham, Leeds and Belfast in Northern Ireland. More protests are planned in the coming days.

In a now-closed Telegram group, 'Southport Wake Up', rioters shared locations of immigration centres and legal firms that would be targeted in north London, Birmingham, Blackpool, Oxford, Lincoln, Southampton, Wigan and elsewhere.

What has the British government said?

Starmer announced a national violent disorder programme last week that would include a wider use of facial recognition technology among other measures.

"These thugs are mobile, they move from community to community," he said. 

"We must have a policing response that can do the same. Shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology and preventative action, criminal behaviour orders to restrict their movements, before they can even board a train in just the same way that we do with football hooligans," Starmer said.

As well as using facial recognition, data from sources such as the British Transport Police could be used to detect a spike in train ticket sales which might be linked to violence.

However, the government has not yet announced any specific detail about the expanded operations.

How is facial recognition already used by the police?

Britain has expanded its use of facial recognition significantly, drawing data from an estimated 6 million CCTV cameras across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

There are three types of facial recognition the police use: live facial recognition, which scans in real-time and checks faces against a watchlist; retrospective facial recognition, which is applied to images taken from CCTV; and operator-initiated facial recognition which works via a mobile phone app for in-person checks.

In an interview with The Times in April, the head of the Metropolitan Police in London, Lindsey Chiswick, said that facial recognition had led to one arrest every two hours.

But biometric systems can cause unforeseen problems, with concerns over public knowledge and data privacy. For example, some researchers raised concerns over the use of a face recognition app that let letting people swap a face scan for food of their choice instead of making do with donations.

"Do people actually have the ability to say 'no' and is consent really informed?" Christy Lowe, a senior research officer at UK-based think tank ODI, said at the time.

How have online rights groups responded to Starmer's pledge?

Organisations such as Big Brother Watch and Amnesty International pushed back against the prime minister's proposal for greater surveillance, comparing the measure to practices used by authoritarian states and saying it did not address the cause of the issue.

"AI surveillance turns members of the public into walking ID cards, is dangerously inaccurate and has no explicit legal basis in the UK. Whilst common in Russia and China, live facial recognition is banned in Europe," said Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch.

"To promise the country ineffective AI surveillance in these circumstances was frankly tone deaf and will give the public absolutely no confidence that this government has the competence or conviction to get tough on the causes of these crimes and protect the public," Carlo said.

The head of Amnesty International UK, Sacha Deshmukh, said "dangerous and discriminatory 'quick fix' solutions like the further deployment of facial-recognition technology or 24-hour courts ... creates the potential to challenge judgements and so end up in fact damaging confidence in the judicial process."

He went on to say that the government should tackle racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia at the root, including by  addressing dangerous rhetoric from politicians and commentators on social media.

(Reporting by Adam Smith in London; Editing by Jon Hemming.)