Experts have warned of a'frightening expansion' of'Orwellian' technology as the government expands the use of live facial recognition across the country. Ten vans equipped with facial recognition cameras will be deployed across seven police forces – Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire. The Home Office maintains that this technology will only be used to catch'high–harm' offenders with rules to ensure'safeguards and oversight'. According to the government, the technology has already been used to make 580 arrests in London over the last year, including 52 registered sex offenders. However, rights groups have raised concerns that the unprecedented rollout of this surveillance technology risks becoming overly intrusive.

Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe's censorship policies in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. The Trump administration has been on a monthslong campaign railing against what it says are draconian censorship regulations in Europe that have not only stifled free speech, but have also served as another roadblock amid the artificial intelligence evolution. "In Europe, thousands are being convicted for the crime of criticizing their own governments," the State Department recently posted to X, accompanied by a graphic slamming Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA). The EU adopted the DSA in 2022 to regulate online platforms such as social networks, content-sharing platforms and app stores, and is intended to "prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation." The law has since faced opposition from the Trump administration amid its free speech promotion on the global stage.

The European Union is considering controversial proposals to mass scan private communications on encrypted messaging apps for child sex abuse material. Under the proposed legislation, photos, videos, and URLs sent on popular apps such as WhatsApp and Signal would be scanned by an artificial intelligence-powered algorithm against a government database of known abuse material. The Council of the EU, one of the bloc's two legislative bodies, is due to vote on the legislation, popularly known as Chat Control 2.0, on Thursday. If passed by the council, which represents the governments of the bloc's 27 member states, the proposals will move forward to the next legislative phase and negotiations on the exact terms of the law. While EU officials have argued that Chat Control 2.0 will help prevent child sex exploitation, encrypted messaging platforms and privacy advocates have fiercely opposed the proposals, likening them to the mass surveillance of George Orwell's 1984.

Live facial recognition cameras are a form of mass surveillance, human rights campaigners have said, as the Met police said it would press ahead with its use of the "gamechanging" technology. Britain's largest force said the technology could be used to catch terrorists and find missing people after research published on Wednesday reported a "substantial improvement" in its accuracy. The research, carried out by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), found there were minimal discrepancies for race and sex when the technology was used at certain settings. It was commissioned by the Met and South Wales police in late 2021 after fierce public debate about police use of the technology. But the human rights groups Liberty, Big Brother Watch and Amnesty have said the technology is oppressive and "turns us into walking ID cards".

Co-Op is facing a legal challenge to its'Orwellian' and'unlawful' use of facial recognition cameras. Privacy rights group Big Brother Watch claimed supermarket staff could add people to a secret'blacklist' without them knowing. But Co-Op says it is using the Facewatch system in shops with a history of crime, so it can protect its staff. Big Brother Watch said the independent grocery chain had installed the surveillance technology in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton and London. It claimed staff could add individuals to a watch-list where their biometric information is kept for up to two years.

The government of South Australia has implemented a new policy requiring Australians to use an app with facial recognition software and geolocation to prove that they are abiding by a 14-day quarantine for travel within the country. While a conservative policy expert described the policy as "Orwellian," he told Fox News that it represents an improvement over the current COVID-19 policy. Australia has banned international travel unless residents have a permit to leave the country. The country has also severely restricted travel between the six states of Australia. Residents must spend 14 days in quarantine upon return.

Black Lives Matter is reverberating around the world, triggering a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of colonialism and slavery. While Confederate statues began to tumble across the American South, in Bristol, England, a diverse group felled a statue of a slave trader that has long provoked offense. Statues of colonial conquerors of Africa and South Asia have followed, along with a robust discussion of the ways in which such actions make history rather than erase it. These movements abroad are not merely echoes of BLM; BLM itself is global. The shared impetus is a common opposition to racism, of which anti-Black racism has been the most lethal and traumatic.

Civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has launched a legal challenge against the use of automatic facial recognition technology by London's Metropolitan Police force. The privacy campaigners described the Met's "China-style" facial recognition system, which uses AI software to match people's faces to a criminal database, as "dangerously authoritarian." "Facial recognition is the latest Orwellian mass surveillance tool to be lawlessly rolled out by the state," Big Brother Watch writes on the campaign website. "These real-time facial recognition cameras are biometric checkpoints, identifying members of the public without their knowledge. Police have begun feeding secret watchlists to the cameras, containing not only criminals but suspects, protesters, football fans and innocent people with mental health problems."