How Britain could weaponise CCTV and ID cards to control you

The line between democracy and totalitarianism is blurring in the UK’s surveillance state Daily Telegraph - 08/12/25 link The gates at the Tube station open as you approach, and the facial recognition in the camera bank mounted on the far wall matches your features to your government records and then to your bank account. The man behind you is wearing a scarf – he taps his phone and his banking app is debited. The software of his banking app, tied to his Department for Work and Pensions records, informs the gate that he receives Universal Credit, and the fare is reduced accordingly. The third man has a harder time, and the gates don’t open. An icon on his phone flashes a red bar through a green leaf – he has exceeded his carbon allocation for the month and must purchase additional personal units.

You take your seat and scroll through your social media feed. Small badges next to usernames show that each has a verified identity, accessible with a tap. Some are complaining about overzealous enforcement of the Communications Act, with the real-time reporting of offences overloading the court system for cases relating to alleged hate speech. Most seem to think that this is a reasonable approach to ensuring that community relations are smoothed over, and if they don’t, they aren’t willing to say so in a forum with such close monitoring. Before going into the office, you stop at Pret for a coffee. Another tap of your phone, and another quick check of your records. No heart conditions on the health record, so no bar to caffeine. A disapproving message still nudges you to exercise caution with your intake. The man behind you is flatly rejected since his BMI is well over the approved threshold for sugary drinks, and his welfare payments are not approved for use on luxury items. All of this is possible through the creation of integrated government databases, pulling information from the private sector and matching it to internal flags in a series of requests. At its core is the unique identifier issued to every British resident – a personal digital ID that acts as the fulcrum of the system. Proof of identity This isn’t science fiction. Last week, the Government announced plans to roll out facial recognition technology throughout the country, running images through police, passport and immigration databases, and potentially putting live cameras in every town centre. Sarah Jones, the policing minister, described the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA matching”. The assessment isn’t wrong. A thief caught on camera in a store can be identified, fed into a database of suspects, while alerting the police to their presence and allowing for a rapid capture. At the same time, the Home Office’s assessment that the technology will result in “some degree of interference with people’s rights” is perhaps an understatement. The simultaneous introduction of tools for digital and physical tracking creates an opening where technology and infrastructure can combine with the political will to create a surveillance state – tracking, monitoring and identifying individuals, their movements, their associations and their actions, justified by the need to prevent acts of terrorism or crack down on unwanted protests. For critics of an overbearing state, ID cards and surveillance cameras have become the most visible elements of this infrastructure. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, the character of Koroviev provides perhaps the most concise summary of life in Soviet Russia: “No papers, no person.” The same phrase could be applied with near equal accuracy to any modern state, and, in particular, to Britain. We are surrounded by things that identify us. When you are born, that fact is registered on a certificate, alongside your name and the names and professions of your parents. If you want to drive, you must possess a licence, usually in the form of a photocard. If you want to leave the British Isles, you will need to produce a passport. Alongside this paperwork is a long trail of utility bills and bank statements, unique identifying numbers for your tax returns, National Insurance contributions and NHS record. The gates at the Tube station open as you approach, and the facial recognition in the camera bank mounted on the far wall matches your features to your government records and then to your bank account. The man behind you is wearing a scarf – he taps his phone and his banking app is debited. The software of his banking app, tied to his Department for Work and Pensions records, informs the gate that he receives Universal Credit, and the fare is reduced accordingly. The third man has a harder time, and the gates don’t open. An icon on his phone flashes a red bar through a green leaf – he has exceeded his carbon allocation for the month and must purchase additional personal units. You take your seat and scroll through your social media feed. Small badges next to usernames show that each has a verified identity, accessible with a tap. Some are complaining about overzealous enforcement of the Communications Act, with the real-time reporting of offences overloading the court system for cases relating to alleged hate speech. Most seem to think that this is a reasonable approach to ensuring that community relations are smoothed over, and if they don’t, they aren’t willing to say so in a forum with such close monitoring. Advertisement Before going into the office, you stop at Pret for a coffee. Another tap of your phone, and another quick check of your records. No heart conditions on the health record, so no bar to caffeine. A disapproving message still nudges you to exercise caution with your intake. The man behind you is flatly rejected since his BMI is well over the approved threshold for sugary drinks, and his welfare payments are not approved for use on luxury items. All of this is possible through the creation of integrated government databases, pulling information from the private sector and matching it to internal flags in a series of requests. At its core is the unique identifier issued to every British resident – a personal digital ID that acts as the fulcrum of the system. Proof of identity This isn’t science fiction. Last week, the Government announced plans to roll out facial recognition technology throughout the country, running images through police, passport and immigration databases, and potentially putting live cameras in every town centre. Sarah Jones, the policing minister, described the technology as the “biggest breakthrough since DNA matching”. The assessment isn’t wrong. A thief caught on camera in a store can be identified, fed into a database of suspects, while alerting the police to their presence and allowing for a rapid capture. At the same time, the Home Office’s assessment that the technology will result in “some degree of interference with people’s rights” is perhaps an understatement. The simultaneous introduction of tools for digital and physical tracking creates an opening where technology and infrastructure can combine with the political will to create a surveillance state – tracking, monitoring and identifying individuals, their movements, their associations and their actions, justified by the need to prevent acts of terrorism or crack down on unwanted protests. For critics of an overbearing state, ID cards and surveillance cameras have become the most visible elements of this infrastructure. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, the character of Koroviev provides perhaps the most concise summary of life in Soviet Russia: “No papers, no person.” The same phrase could be applied with near equal accuracy to any modern state, and, in particular, to Britain. We are surrounded by things that identify us. When you are born, that fact is registered on a certificate, alongside your name and the names and professions of your parents. If you want to drive, you must possess a licence, usually in the form of a photocard. If you want to leave the British Isles, you will need to produce a passport. Alongside this paperwork is a long trail of utility bills and bank statements, unique identifying numbers for your tax returns, National Insurance contributions and NHS record. A Eurotunnel passenger's fingerprints are scanned at a new EU Entry/Exit System kiosk As well as having to show their passport, travellers leaving and entering the UK must also now have their fingerprints scannedCredit: Justin Tallis/AFP Proof of identity is taken as a baseline fact. It is extremely hard to live well without an ID in 21st-century Britain, with access to bank accounts, employment and housing gated by checks that require you to demonstrate through official records that you are who you say you are. Hard, but not impossible. The proliferation of identity checks and documents has failed to halt the growth of the shadow economy, or the pull factor it presents to migrants considering the journey across the Channel. For Sir Keir Starmer, the obvious solution is in the form of another ID document paired with mandatory digital right-to-work checks. In the small print of last month’s Budget, it emerged that the total cost of this system is expected to reach £1.8bn over the next three years. The optimist’s case Polling that simply asks the public what they think about the introduction of “a system of national identity cards” (without further detail about what it would mean in practice) is relatively consistent, with 57 per cent of people saying they would support such a system and 25 per cent opposing it. Polling on facial recognition is similar, with about half the population comfortable with its use, and a third opposed. And the cases made for these technologies are not without charm. Facial recognition promises a safer, more secure society, in which the police can crack down on habitual criminals. Alexander Iosad, director of government innovation policy at the Tony Blair Institute, notes in turn that the proliferation of identity documents we already hold “is the problem digital ID is intended to solve”. At present, he says, we have “a fragmented landscape” which “creates inconsistency in how people with different IDs interact with the state”, and prevents the linking of records to provide better services. “I have five or six government IDs because every time I do a different task, I use a slightly different system. And that’s not secure, and it’s very frustrating. There’s a lot of waste because systems aren’t joined up, and we can’t tell that the same person is the same person.” Even on the matter of illegal working, the current system accepts checks of paper documents that can be forged. Verifying that a document is genuine is not straightforward. “There are 10,000 words of guidance on how to check identity,” Iosad notes. Digital ID systems are one answer to this – they’re “not a silver bullet”, but they can help to hit the people smuggling gangs who see the “absence of consistent checks” as a marketing tool. “Digital ID ... leaves an audit trail. We can see who completed checks, and we can cross-reference to see which landlords and companies aren’t completing the checks we’d expect.” That could lead to data on those “who are working with these criminal groups.’” The road downwards While these additional uses raise a risk of errors – linking ID to benefits or NHS eligibility, and accidentally denying British citizens access for long periods while digital glitches are fixed at bureaucratic speeds. Similarly, errors in facial recognition that result in the wrong person being halted by the police have the potential to cause significant aggravation among those who find themselves having to prove that they’re hurrying to a meeting rather than fleeing the law. But the greater problem would appear to lie in the type of scheme that the Government expands ID into. It is not particularly hard to see how the system could evolve from its core of identity verification through a series of reasonable, well-intentioned additions. Take, for instance, the Online Safety Act, and the challenges faced by age-verification processes. Digital ID would end the patchwork of private-sector entities – some more legitimate, some less – attempting to ensure that people on social media, or accessing adult content, are over the age of 18. Banks, meanwhile, could link accounts to identities, ensuring that those receiving regular payments have the right to work in the UK, shutting off another avenue for illegal working. But you might not want private sector entities tying your data together and tracking you throughout your life – from banking to porn habits to place of work. To avoid this, Britain could learn from India’s Aadhaar digital identification system, which resolved this problem through the use of “virtual Aadhaar ID” numbers, which can be requested for each firm you do business with. The Indian state, on the other hand, does know which virtual number had been used where, and which identity it can be tied back to. This means that the state is capable of tying that information together again, if it wants to. The British state has already made clear its willingness to use the legal tools available to prosecute prominent social media critics of trans ideology or mass migration, leading to accusations of two-tier policing. But this process involves friction – the identity of social media users can be obscured, or concealed, with sufficient precautions. A system that neatly links personal identity to financial and social media accounts, however, could provide a useful streamlining for censors. Rather than having to obtain email addresses, sign-up details and IP addresses through search warrants and court orders, a state willing to use it could possess a ready-made database linking real names and identities to posts online, removing the protections of anonymity. The gloomier visions of pessimists, in which those who overstep the line in criticising migration or other aspects of elite ideology find themselves effectively “unpersoned”, have a degree of technological plausibility to them. Notifying the authorities of wrongthink – whether in public posts or private messages – could become almost automatic. A single ID linked to your health records, bank accounts, tax account and social media creates a world of possibilities we might not like. A government more interested in a fair benefits system could use the linking of bank cards to identity to restrict benefits claimants from purchasing alcohol, tobacco, takeaway food or other luxury items with the money in their accounts – a hyper-modern version of the US food stamp restrictions. A different government more interested in pursuing net zero at all costs would face the temptation to resurrect the long-abandoned idea of personal carbon budgets, or at least individual limits on specified high-carbon activities through rationing flights or household gas according to ideological preferences. The risk is not so much that Britain will lurch into totalitarianism overnight. As we saw during the Covid pandemic, the state already has the power to behave in authoritarian ways if it wishes to do so, and many of these outcomes are already possible. But at present, British citizens enjoy a degree of security through obscurity – it takes effort to tie data together, and effort is costly and visible. Mission creep that reduces the friction of such efforts lays the groundwork for far greater imposition on citizens. It’s a similar story with facial recognition. Parts of London already rank among the most surveilled places on the planet, while police facial recognition vans have set up in town centres across the country. Once the link between live databases and cameras is established, the potential for expansion is there. Research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has set out the extent to which rapid developments in AI have allowed the Chinese state to clamp down on its population, with suspects arrested when they pop up on “the world’s largest AI-powered surveillance network”, and jailed in prisons where systems monitor their “emotions, facial expressions and movements”. In the 2022 protests against Covid lockdowns, even protesters “who covered their faces and never interacted with police were tracked and visited by authorities at their homes”. China’s social credit system Perhaps the most interesting example of mission creep is the Chinese state’s social credit system. The vision this conjures is a single number that governs your life. Should your social credit score drop too far, you will be subject to re-education, barred from employment and unpersoned. As Orwellian as the premise sounds, the practical implementation is more familiar. Vincent Brussee is a PhD candidate in China Studies at Leiden University, and the author of the book Social Credit: The Warring States of China’s Emerging Data Empire. In his words, “on the basic level, there is no unified social credit system to begin with”. As China pursued economic reform, greater use of market mechanisms required the infrastructure to enable effective exchange. “Social credit” was a means to combat fraud and non-compliance with loan payments or court orders, allowing potential business partners to see the track record of their counterparty – akin to Western credit scores. The primary difference in this layer is in enforcement. “The social credit picture is incredibly messy,” Brussee says. “Even the government is occasionally confused about it.” But in terms of enforcement, the outcome is a ban. “If you misbehave while travelling on a plane or long-distance train, you get put on a no-fly or no-ride list for usually 12-18 months.” If you disobey a court order, often relating to a business contract, loan repayment or fine, you can be “banned from high-speed trains, regular trains in first class, and from flights until you pay”. The rationale is straightforward – defaulters with the deemed ability to pay are “blocked from ‘high-class consumption’ until they pay their debts”. They are similarly blocked from “staying in expensive hotels, buying luxury apartments, or sending their children to private schools”. And if you commit fraud, you can face the revocation of bank loans, qualifications and subsidies. On a national level, the social credit system is less a single entity than an index of blacklists. Locally, things have differed. When the core system began to consider regulatory elements like food hygiene records, cities expanded into other fields. As Brussee puts it, some officials “collecting compliance records” rapidly expanded the concept: “We’ll look at your protest activities, your fights with your neighbours, your failure to collect dog muck.” Cities scored citizens for failing to separate rubbish correctly or jaywalking. These initiatives, however, proved extremely controversial, criticised “by average Chinese citizens, but also by authoritative news outlets like the People’s Daily. They were controversial at the highest level of Chinese political thinking”. Later on, the central government explicitly stated that citizens shouldn’t be penalised for low social scores, marking an effective end to the experiment. This was not, however, motivated by a sudden love of liberty. “The conclusion they’ve drawn is that surveillance works best if it’s imperceptible,” Brussee says. For those in the West, the conclusion is both optimistic and uncomfortable: “If the Government wants to repress you, it’ll find ways to do it. A lack of a digital ID system is never going to be the primary barrier.” What keeps us safe from authoritarianism is a cultural hostility to it. What leads us towards it is the incentive to maintain state control. The state panopticon The Hungarian sinologist, Étienne Balázs, once described the Chinese state of several centuries ago as “a regime of paperwork and harassment, endless paperwork and endless harassment”, where the “providential state watches minutely over every step of its subjects, from cradle to grave”. That the same description could aptly be repurposed for modern Britain speaks less to a shared abnormality than the fundamental nature of large, organised nations. The project of modern governance consists in large part of organising people, land and capital in ways that maximise the resources the state has to draw on, developing both productive capacity and the ability to command it when it has to. And in order to command something, you have to be able to articulate what it is you wish to happen, where. We are so used to the pervasive measurement and tracking that this requires that we barely even notice some of its more extreme forms. As the late political scientist James C Scott argued, the adoption of fixed, inherited surnames was “a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens”. Kemal Ataturk, for instance, imposed permanent legal family names in Turkey as “the creation of a powerful modern state required a system of meticulous taxation and conscription” which “required legible, personal identities”. The incentives facing states are generally to exert control – or the potential of control – over activities that take place within their realms. The incentives of citizens are not necessarily to resist them. In an article published in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2002, Scott and his co-authors invited readers to “imagine electronic bracelets transmitting distinctive signals to a global-positioning satellite, allowing the police to know, at any time, the precise location of every person of interest”. The idea that the state might mandate such a system is, of course, absurd – we have already adopted it voluntarily. We carry with us on a daily basis phones which register our locations, and we freely hand over sensitive personal information to Google Search, OpenAI, Amazon and other private-sector entities. We use facial recognition to unlock devices and install security cameras into our doorbells, uploading a rolling feed of activity into servers other people control. Our activities online leave a trail behind us that is repackaged, sold and sometimes reassembled. In one notable instance, a clergyman resigned after he was allegedly outed through the de-anonymisation of location data from a gay dating app. As in China, a Western government that wants to behave in totalitarian ways can do so. In 2022, Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, chose to shut down the Freedom Convoy protest against a Covid vaccine mandate by invoking his country’s emergency act, using the powers it contained to freeze the bank accounts of those involved. Getty Britain, meanwhile, has acquired a reputation for digital censorship with no particular effort to build a comprehensive identification system. As Iosad argues, “lots of countries that are democratic have digital ID and haven’t become a totalitarian nightmare. There’s no technical barrier – any government can build a system of this kind”. The barrier, again, is cultural. Would the British public tolerate a state panopticon? Would they be able to object to it? Would they even recognise it? It is the potential hostility to this project that, in part, has ruled out the software giant, Palantir, taking part in any digital ID project in Britain. Louis Mosley, the head of the UK arm of the firm, has said that the company’s policy is to “help democratically elected governments implement the policies they have been elected to deliver, and that does mean that often we are involved in the implementation of very controversial measures. Digital ID is not one that was tested at the last election. It wasn’t in the manifesto. So we haven’t had clear, resounding public support at the ballot box for its implementation. So it isn’t one for us”. Combined with his “personal concerns” about such systems, and the “surface area of risk” created by the proliferation of digital systems, it’s not hard to see how this conclusion was reached. For the rest of us considering whether we want to live with such a system, it’s worth thinking for a moment about the relationship between citizen and state. Across many systems, the Government already knows perfectly well who you are, a good amount of what you do, and is inclined at times to use this knowledge to enforce its will. The advent of digital ID, however, will make its knowledge far more complete and the temptation to use it far stronger.