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Landmark legal challenge against police facial recognition begins | Computer Weekly

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Landmark legal challenge against police facial recognition begins | Computer Weekly


A judicial review against the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition (LFR) will argue the force is unlawfully deploying the technology across London, without effective safeguards or constraints in place to protect people’s human rights from invasive biometric surveillance.

Brought by anti-knife campaigner Shaun Thompson, who was wrongfully identified by the Met’s system and subject to a prolonged stop as a result, and privacy group Big Brother Watch, the challenge will argue there are no meaningful safeguards in place to effectively limit how the Met uses the technology.

In particular, it will argue the Met’s policy on where it can be deployed and who it can be used to target is so permissive and leaves so much discretion to the force that it cannot be considered “in accordance with law”.

“The reason for the ‘who’ requirement is clear,” wrote Thompson and Big Brother Watch in their skeleton argument for the case. “It serves to protect against people being selected for a watchlist for reasons that are arbitrary, discriminatory or without sufficient basis. As to the ‘where’ requirement, the concern is not with the individuals on the watchlist, but the thousands of innocent people who will have their biometric data taken while going about lawful quotidian activities.”

They added that, as with the “who”, similarly constraining officers’ discretion as to “where” LFR can be used inhibits officers from selecting locations for reasons that are arbitrary, discriminatory, or otherwise have an insufficient basis.

“That is a safeguard against individual officers selecting areas arbitrarily or improperly targeting areas where people of certain races or religions disproportionately live or consistently targeting deprived communities in London,” they wrote, adding that if there are insufficient constraints on “where” LFR can be used, it will be impossible for people to travel across London without their biometric data being captured and processed.

“Any public place risks becoming one in which people’s identities are liable to be checked to see if they are of interest to the police,” they continued. “That would be to fundamentally transform public spaces and people’s relationship with the police.”

Rights breaches

Ultimately, Thompson and Big Brother Watch will argue that the Met’s LFR use breaches the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly.

This marks the first legal challenge in Europe brought by someone misidentified by facial recognition technology.

After Thompson was wrongly flagged by the technology when travelling through London Bridge, officers detained him while they asked for identity documents, repeatedly demanded fingerprint scans, and inspected him for scars and tattoos.

The police stop continued for over 20 minutes, during which time Thompson was threatened with arrest, despite providing multiple identity documents showing he had been falsely identified.

Thompson, a 39-year-old Black man, described the police’s use of LFR at the time as “stop and search on steroids”.

In August 2020, the Court of Appeal previously found that South Wales Police (SWP) had been deploying LFR unlawfully, on the grounds there were insufficient constraints on the force’s discretion over where LFR could be used, and who could be placed on a watchlist.

“The possibility of being subjected to a digital identity check by police without our consent almost anywhere, at any time, is a serious infringement on our civil liberties that is transforming London,” said Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo ahead of the case being heard.

“When used as a mass surveillance tool, live facial recognition reverses the presumption of innocence and destroys any notion of privacy in our capital. This legal challenge is a landmark step towards protecting the public against intrusive monitoring.”

Legal arguments

On where police can deploy LFR, the Met’s policy documents state the force can deploy LFR cameras at “crime hotspots”, including “access routes” to those hotspots; for “protective security operations”, meaning at public events or critical national infrastructure; and locations based on officers’ intelligence about “the likely location [of] … sought persons”.

However, according to their skeleton argument, Thompson and Big Brother Watch will say the policy does “not meaningfully constrain the discretion as to where LFR can be located”.

It added that while these use cases are intended to circumscribe where the tech can be used, a third-party analysis conducted by Martin Utley – a professor of operational research at University College London – suggests that, in practice, “they confer far too broad a discretion on individual officers, and permit them to deploy LFR anywhere they choose in the significant majority, if not the vast majority, of public spaces in the Metropolitan Police District at any time”.

The argument also added that while the Met’s LFR policy permits officers to designate areas as “crime hotspots” based on “operational experience as to future criminality”, this is “opaque and entirely subjective”.

Utley specifically found that an estimated 47% of the Met’s policing district is labelled as a “crime hotspot”, and that LFR could be deployed on access routes that cover a further 38%, rendering 85% of London open to LFR deployments.

A separate analysis conducted by the Met found that LFR can be located in around 40% of the Metropolitan Police District, compared with Utley’s 47%.

Highlighting how SWP’s use of the tech was found unlawful due to the broad discretion conferred to officers in that case, the argument claims that, taken all together, the Met’s deployment use cases mean that “most of the city is covered”.

“There are two ways LFR can be deployed,” it said. “It can be used in a targeted way. For example, if the police have reasonable grounds to suspect that particular individuals were going to engage in violence at a football game, they could be placed on a watchlist and LFR used to detect their presence in the vicinity.

“Or LFR can be deployed in a mass and untargeted way, selecting areas where a very large number of people are likely to pass and using a very large watchlist, in the hope that someone on the list will happen to pass by.

“It was precisely such mass and untargeted use that concerned the CA [Court of Appeal] in Bridges [the case against SWP], which discretion it considered had to be constrained.”

Unlike the case against SWP’s LFR use, however, which sought to determine the proportionality of the interferences with a specific person’s individual rights on the two occasions his biometric information was captured by the system, the judicial review seeks to challenge the lawfulness of the technology’s mass use.

“For the purpose of the IAWL [in accordance with law] requirement it is critical if there is mass use of LFR to repeatedly process the biometric data of millions of people with the capacity to transform public spaces,” it said. “When considering what is required in terms of constraints and safeguards to ensure a measure is IAWL, the Court must consider, among other things, the number of people a measure affects, and not a single individual’s rights.”

The Met, on the other hand, will argue that the public are “generally at liberty to avoid the relevant LFR area”, and that as individuals’ “familiarity” with LFR increases, it can be considered less rights-intrusive.

The force will also argue that, because officers’ discretion around LFR deployments is not unconstrained, the case is not an IAWL issue, asserting that “so long as the Court is satisfied there is not unfettered discretion on the constable deciding where to locate LFR, [there] is not a maintainable legality challenge.”

The Met added that because “there are no parts of the Policy that allow unfettered discretion for an officer to add whomever he or she wants to a watchlist or place the LFR camera wherever he or she wishes … there is no maintainable attack on the Policy as lacking the quality of law”.

In essence, the Met claims that questions about the breadth of officers’ discretion relate only to the proportionality of its approach, rather than its overall lawfulness.

Lack of primary legislation

The landmark legal challenge against LFR is being heard just a matter of weeks after the UK government pledged to “ramp up” the police use of facial recognition and biometrics.

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.

However, in December 2025, the Home Office launched a 10-week consultation on the use of LFR by UK police, allowing interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.

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”.

It 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.

There have also been repeated calls from both Parliament and civil society over many years for the police’s use of facial recognition to be regulated.

This includes three separate inquiries by the Justice and Home Affairs Committee into shopliftingpolice algorithms and police facial recognition; two of the UK’s former biometrics commissioners, Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson; an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission; and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which called for a moratorium on live facial recognition as far back as July 2019.

More recently, the Ada Lovelace Institute published a report in May 2025 that said the UK’s patchwork approach to regulating biometric surveillance technologies is “inadequate”, placing fundamental rights at risk and ultimately undermining public trust.

In August 2025, after being granted permission to intervene in the judicial review of the Met’s LFR use, the UK’s equality watchdog said the force is using the technology unlawfully, citing the need for its deployments to be necessary, proportionate and respectful of human rights.



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Top Design Within Reach Promo Codes for March 2026

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Top Design Within Reach Promo Codes for March 2026


Design Within Reach carries some of the best and coolest home decor you can find, from modern couches to fantastic office chairs and fun designers like Herman Miller and Dusen Dusen. It’s not a cheap store to shop at, though, which is what makes these coupons something to jump on. Unlock online-exclusive discounts of up to 50%, free shipping, plus 20% off featured brands and 15% off office furniture bundles with Design Within Reach promo codes and Summer 2025 sale events. Save on hundreds of stylish items, including our favorite Design Within Reach office chairs, plus some other fantastic home gear we’ve earmarked for testing.

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A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing

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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.



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A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War

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“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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