After Monday’s emergency (‘Cobra’) meeting, Starmer told the media that he was considering additional measures, including the creation of a “standing army” of specialist law enforcement officers able to be deployed across the UK, ramp up criminal justice, and identifying and naming participants in protests as quickly as possible. Criminal law applies online as well as offline, the PM said, “and I am assured that’s the approach that is being taken.” He added,
This is not protest. It is pure violence, and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities, so the full force of the law will be visited on all those who are identified as having taken part in these activities.
Sir Keir Starmer announced on Thursday last week that the authorities are looking into how they can “deploy facial recognition technology … more widely across the country.” Civil liberties campaigners have long criticised the rolling out of facial recognition surveillance cameras, which take ‘faceprints’ of millions of people. The Big Brother Watch campaigning organisation said today, on August 5th, that “these are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications.”
👁️PM wants to EXPAND facial recognition use in the UK- meanwhile this tech is largely banned in the EU
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) August 5, 2024
“These are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications.” - @silkiecarlo
Read ⤵️https://t.co/CiL2Jad5te
There has also been much discussion over the weekend about the possibility of proscribing the English Defence League—which voices both on the Right and the Left agree has effectively ceased to exist—as terrorist, and about how social media companies can ‘do more’ to ‘tackle’ ‘disinformation.’