“To government ministers and police chiefs, it is the biggest investigative breakthrough since DNA screening,” said Mario Ledwith in The Times . “To privacy campaigners, it is ‘turning the country into an open prison’.”

Live facial recognition is already used by eight police forces, who used the technology to scan tens of thousands of faces a day with “ruthless efficiency”, looking for matches to a police hit list of offenders and suspects. Now the Government is looking into expanding its scope.

‘Orwellian’

Under the plans, all 43 police forces in England and Wales would have access to facial recognition. The Home Office would also develop a national face-matching system based not just on images of all offenders in custody, but potentially the passport and driving licence photos o

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