THE Home Secretary has said she wants to create a “Panopticon” system of state surveillance.
Shabana Mahmood revealed that she wanted a system where “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times” while invoking an enduringly controversial proposal by the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
In comments reported on Monday by The Telegraph, Mahmood said she wanted to use artificial intelligence for surveillance, as she proposed “Minority Report-style” policing.
“AI and technology can be transformative to the whole of the law and order space,” said the Home Secretary in an interview with former prime minister Tony Blair last month.
“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.
“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
Bentham’s most famous idea was for prisons to be based on the “Panopticon”, which meant that guards would be able to monitor all inmates constantly. This would be achieved by creating circular prisons with a central watchtower from which prisoners would be observed without the guard being visible.
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A UK Government source told The Telegraph: “This doesn’t mean watching people who are non-criminals – but she feels like, if you commit a crime, you sacrifice the right to the kind of liberty the rest of us enjoy.”
Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman told The National: "This is absolutely shocking. What Shabana Mahmood is calling for is essentially a deeply authoritarian, 'Big Brother' state. It is totally unacceptable, and we must resist this dystopian future.
“Everyone is entitled to a level of privacy in their lives regardless of their history or wrongdoings. We know too that surveillance by the state in this way would not be restricted to potential or actual criminals.
“Once it is in place, it would obviously be used on a much wider scale. We’ve already seen this with other forms of surveillance. The notion that 'if you’ve not done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about' is never justification for such widespread curtailment of civil liberties."
It is not clear whether this system of surveillance would apply only to prisoners or to all people under the watch of the criminal justice system in England and Wales.
Police chiefs south of the Border are also considering plans to use AI in a bid to predict whether people will commit crimes, The Telegraph reports.
In plans that echo the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, police forces are looking at monitoring 1000 men they believe pose the highest risk to women to predict whether they will commit crimes.
Minority Report depicts a world where police can foresee crimes before they happen and arrest the would-be perpetrators. It is considered dystopian science fiction.
Andy Marsh, the head of the College of Policing, told The Telegraph: “We know the data and case histories tell us that, unfortunately, it’s far from uncommon for these individuals to move from one female victim to another, and we understand all of the difficulties of bringing successful cases to bear in court.
“So what we want to do is use these predictive tools to take the battle to those individuals, so that they are the ones who are frightened because the police are coming after them and we’re going to lock them up.”
Pete Wishart, the SNP's Home Office spokesperson said that Labour wanted "the state to use AI as a means to watch people's every move".
He added: "Obviously new technology can and should be used to ensure more criminals are caught but the Home Secretary appears to be openly advocating for the idea of a surveillance state - where people's rights and privacy are of no concern and have no protection.
"It feels no coincidence that the Home Secretary made these remarks while casually chatting to Tony Blair – the man whose institute first came up with the 'Brit Card' idea.
"As the Labour Party gets increasingly desperate because of the disaster they have made in government, it seems they are reaching for ever more extreme policies."