Tech
Home Office announces sweeping police technology plans | Computer Weekly
The Home Office has outlined plans for the massive roll-out of artificial intelligence (AI) and facial-recognition technologies as part of sweeping reforms to the UK’s “broken” policing system.
Announced 26 January 2026 by home secretary Shabana Mahmood, the reforms will see the Home Office place substantial investment into the deployment of AI and facial recognition throughout UK policing, while establishing a new National Police Service (NPS) to streamline the fragmented, 43-force model the UK currently operates under.
The government has said the new service will also subsume a range of existing central bodies, such as the National Crime Agency (NCA) and Counter Terrorism Policing, and will play a critical role in coordinating, adopting and standarising the use of data-driven technologies.
According to a whitepaper published by government on the reforms, deployments of AI and facial recognition vary markedly across forces, as each force making its own decisions and investments has resulted in “policing is radically under-utilising technology and data”.
It added that the current fragmentation of data and technology infrastructure – which are plagued by aging systems, manual processes and poor data quality – is slowing down investigations and leaving police unable to keep pace with the increasing rate of digitally enabled crime, which the Home Office said now accounts for nine of every 10 crimes.
“Criminals are operating in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, some police forces are still fighting crime with analogue methods,” said Mahmood. “We will roll out state-of-the-art tech to get more officers on the streets and put rapists and murderers behind bars.”
By also applying AI to some of the biggest administrative burdens facing police – including disclosure, analysis of CCTV footage, production of case files, crime recording and classification, and translating or transcribing documents – the Home Office claims it will free up six million policing hours each year.
“To meet this moment policing needs national leadership in how we develop and deploy technology, greater consistency in the recording, sharing and analysis of data, and a culture of responsible innovation so that successful local initiatives can be rolled out at scale,” said the whitepaper.
“A reformed system is an essential step in unlocking the potential of technology, data and AI in policing…By delivering police digital, data and technology infrastructure in a coherent and strategic manner at the national level for the first time, the NPS will ensure that officers and staff have access to the best available technology and insights. Ultimately, this will deliver smarter operational policing and save officer time, helping them focus on tackling crime and keeping the public safe.”
Under the reform proposals, the Home Office will increase the number of live facial-recognition (LFR) vans available to police from 10 to 50; set up a new National Centre for AI in Policing (to be known as Police.AI) to build, test and assure AI models for policing contexts; and invest £115m over three years to help identify, test and scale new AI technologies in policing.
Through Police.AI – which is expected to be up and running by spring 2026 – the department will create a registry of the AI being deployed by UK police, which will outline the steps they have taken to ensure the reliability of tools prior to their operational use. The new body will also help to roll out successful projects nationally, such as AI chatbots being trialled by some forces to triage non-urgent online queries.
Further investments being made into data and technology include £26m for the development and delivery of a national facial-recognition system, and another £11.6m on LFR capabilities.
The announcement of the policing reforms follows a judicial review hearing that challenged the lawfulness of the Metropolitan Police’s LFR use, and comes amid an ongoing consultation launched by the Home Office in December 2025 about a new legal framework for the technology.
In a recent interview with former prime minister Tony Blair, Mahmood described her ambition to use technologies such as AI and LFR to achieve Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a “panopticon”, referring to his proposed prison design that would allow a single, unseen guard to silently observe every prisoner at once.
Typically used today as a metaphor for authoritarian control, the underpinning idea of the panopticon is that by instilling a perpetual sense of being watched among the inmates, they would behave as authorities wanted.
“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,” Mahmood told Blair. “That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”
Responding to the policing reforms announced, Ruth Ehrlich, the interim director of external relations at campaign group Liberty, said: “Rolling out powerful surveillance tools while a consultation is still under way undermines public trust and shows disregard for our fundamental rights.”
She added that attempts by police forces to use AI and facial recognition have so far been “plagued by failure”.
“We have seen what happens when facial-recognition technology is rolled out without clear safeguards: children are wrongly placed on watchlists, and Black people are put at greater risk of being wrongly identified.”
Conservative MP David Davis also highlighted “significant error rates” in the use of digital facial ID and AI, telling the House of Commons on the day of the announcement that rolling out these technologies in a law enforcement context could risk “miscarriages of justice”, adding: “Innocent people fear this, particularly after the Post Office scandal, which showed that courts believe computers rather than people.”
While the use of LFR by police – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has already ramped up massively in recent years, there has so far been minimal public debate or consultation, with the Home Office claiming for years that there is already “comprehensive” legal framework in place.
The department has said that although a “patchwork” legal framework for police facial recognition exists (including for the increasing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” versions of the technology), it does not give police themselves the confidence to “use it at significantly greater scale…nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly”.
When launching its consultation on a new framework for the tech, the Home Office added that the current rules governing police LFR use are “complicated and difficult to understand”, and that an ordinary member of the public would be required to read four pieces of legislation, police national guidance documents and a range of detailed legal or data protection documents from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.
Tech
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Tech
A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing
As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”
Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.
For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)
New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.
As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.
Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.
Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.
It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.
Tech
A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War
“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.
The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.
According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.
Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.
The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.
That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.
The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.
Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.
The Return of the Numbers
Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.
Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”
While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.
“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”
The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.
A Signal Without a Sender
While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.
Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.
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