SMILE – chances are you’re on camera. Or maybe you loathe having your ruined body and broken face eternally paused in a stolen moment? Best close the blinds then – you’d be surprised how far that fella operating the high flats’ CCTV can zoom in. And while you’re over there, throw your laptop, tablet and phone out the window. Some blackmailing hacker has likely been watching you through them, poised to press record the moment they hear the rustling of a Kleenex box.

Maybe that’s just my own paranoia talking. Chances are it’ll be an Apple employee recording the euphoric contortion of my features as they secretly research customers’ facial symmetry. It’s probably there in those T&Cs we all hastily scroll past, that our orgasm faces now belong to Apple. They would certainly be a more unique and secure form of identification than fingerprints.

Such extreme security measures would certainly be bad news for the murderous bandits who presently have to unlock stolen phones with their former owner’s dead head or hand. Having to seduce their victims first might put an end to such opportunistic theft.

It’s likely there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, however. Serious crime in Glasgow has fallen dramatically over the past decade. And, in a truly staggering turnaround, the city now sets a precedent in tackling the scourge of knife crime.

Despite this notable drop in (recorded) offences, however, one CCTV camera now exists for every 11 people. This is worse news than freewheeling libertines think – for if everyone in the country was playing football, only half the matches could be filmed. And, as you can tell by the latest reportage on such retrogressive binary hostilities that float like a fibre-free jobby to the top of the heraldscotland.com charts, Glasgow loves football.

This might help explain why the city authorities have so enthusiastically welcomed increased CCTV surveillance in recent years – but not why they are now in the process of installing highly sophisticated AI facial recognition software in their numerous cameras.

Officially, this controversial system will only ever be used to monitor unruly crowds and focus on areas abundant with known criminals or loitering malcontents. Meaning, of course, the post-apocalyptic ruins of Sauchiehall Street – a once buoyant thoroughfare that now looks like it was occupied by Isis and is now going back to nature.

Unofficially, it’s a different story. One that’s apt if you view CCTV as a gift – for Police Scotland certainly seem to have looked to Santa for inspiration lately. Not only with their recent “big sack” – 2,000 employees shunted out the door by voluntary redundancy and job deletion – but they also want to know when you’re sleeping, when you’re awake and when you’ve been bad or good. Yes, you better watch out – for soon they’ll have stolen more faces than Arya from Game of Thrones.

Motives are suspect

INITIALLY being installed in around 70 CCTV banks in Glasgow, the reassuringly monikered, cosy-sounding “Suspect Recognition” service will allow Police Scotland to make use of “advanced video analytics” to track down “individuals involved in crime or anti-social behaviour, and attempt to locate vulnerable individuals and missing children”.

Emotional manipulation using thankfully rare occurrences of crime aside, these are all admirable, if slightly disingenuous, aims – but they are not how the public was originally sold on CCTV. Such monitoring was never intended just to gather evidence for the fiscal after a crime, but to stop it from happening at all as a deterrent. And although countless studies have concluded CCTV doesn’t dampen criminals’ enthusiasm at all, we’re told that we must continue our submission to non-stop surveillance because it stops us becoming victims.

Casual acceptance of CCTV cameras storing our faces seems truly bizarre for a nation which, not so long ago, would be outraged at the thought of even a single low-res eye-in the sky covering our every move. Now they watch us work, rest and play and still we act like no-one is watching. It likely won’t be long until they are installed in bathrooms under the auspices of monitoring the health of our bowel movements - maybe Chuck Berry was simply ahead of his time. 

Perhaps our passive acceptance of living in a reality show that no-one can win is simply because 24/7 snooping of our activities has long since been normalised. These days we willingly invite alien eyes and ears with sinister motives into our homes. And we actually pay for the privilege. What’s to fear if we’re law-abiding anyway? Well, Heaven forbid your testicles get itchy and CCTV spots your instinctive reflex to scratch. Unlikely perhaps, but I did cover one such case as a court reporter in Ayrshire. Camera never lies apparently. 

To some individuals, however, being unable to scratch yourself in public offers hope that, perhaps, the greater “war on crime” can be solved by CCTV. Certainly, repeated political promises to get tough on the causes of crime – social deprivation, familial breakdown, addiction, poverty, ancient social hierarchies weighted in favour of privilege and wealth – have either failed or were simply sweet little political lies, allowing the tech elite enough time to work out how to monetise misery, despair and loneliness.

Minorities Reported

WITH the once-politicised proletariat now pacified by PS4 and Netflix, it’s been down to well-meaning – but ultimately benign – middle-class rebellions to fight against societal inequalities that cause most crime.

In blindly adopting AI surveillance software, it’s ironic the authorities are simply regressing back to an era where society’s most helpless and desperate are branded, tarred and feathered. These true victims of unchecked free market capitalism are sacrificed as a distracting sideshow as the perpetrators of real horrific crimes against humanity flee to private islands and yachts. All with their own CCTV, of course.

Certainly, AI is well on the way to identifying all “undesirables” in terms of credit ratings, and it clearly won’t be long until the Earth is a perpetually-monitored prison planet where only the elites are free from algorithmic AI assessment.

Like in China, where the authorities use a vast system of advanced facial recognition CCTV to monitor the Uighurs, a Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using AI for racial and demographic profiling – which, for realists such as myself, seems to be the inevitable endgame for such tech. Martin Luther King once had a dream, but surely never in the deepest of sleeps did he envision computers would be racist too.

Yet, before we get too excited, it should be noted that South Wales Police Force tested some of this AI at the 2017 Champions League final. Only Juventus had a worse result that night – just 8% of identifications proved accurate.

So will this tech ultimately dissolve what remains of our civil liberties under the auspices of protecting freedom? Well, over in Chicago, operating under the anything-goes legality of George W Bush’s snooper’s charter “Patriot Act”, a policing algorithm exists that perhaps indicates how Glasgow’s new AI will evolve.

It’s something Orwell himself might have satirically dubbed a “Strategic Subject List” – if it wasn’t already called that. The SSL is simply an extensively detailed prediction of all citizens’ potential future involvement in illegal offences. Just like Minority Report, only without psychics and Cruise’s magnificent teeth and hair. Now, smile for the camera. For we’re all movie stars now. 

And finally ...

IT’S likely Glasgow’s leafy west end won’t need any fancy facial recognition tech to clear out the riff raff – ridiculous property prices act as an effective backdoor application of social eugenics. Yet, those who make their nests within such bourgeois societal equilibriums which celebrate materialism and ignore the human tragedy inches outside their gated communities can often lose what makes them human – their hearts.

Entirely coincidentally, HART is the cosy-sounding acronym for yet another real-life dystopian monitoring AI that UK police are adopting to identify undesirables. The “Harm Assessment Risk Tool” in Durham acts as prosecution, judge and jury by predicting a person’s risk of reoffending and how to deal with them.

But apparently this is a friendly, compassionate algorithm. One simply helping old-fashioned biological bobbies decide if offenders should enter a rehab programme called Checkpoint. Cocaine addicts are perhaps referred to Checkpoint Charlie instead. Or the West End if they fail in their rehabilitation.