The High Court says facial recognition is lawful. That doesn't make it right, writes Dean Dunham

The rollout of live facial recognition across Britain's high streets looks very much like one of them.

This week, the High Court ruled against two claimants, youth worker Shaun Thompson and Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch, who argued that the Metropolitan Police's use of live facial recognition technology breached their human rights. The judges found that the force's policy gave an "adequate indication of the circumstances in which LFR will be used". The government, barely pausing for breath, declared it would now roll the technology out across the country.

You are forgiven if you feel something uneasy settle in your stomach.

The Home Office's line is a familiar one. "Live facial recognition only locates specifically wanted people," the government insists. "Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear." It is a phrase with an impressive pedigree, used to justify ID cards, mass data retention, and just about every expansion of the surveillance state in living memory, and every time it is pitched as a choice between safety and paranoia. Accept the cameras, or side with the rapists and murderers. There is no middle ground on offer.

But the middle ground is precisely where most of us actually live.

Consider Shaun Thompson himself. He says he was misidentified, detained and threatened with arrest. He was compliant with officers, but his bank cards and passport weren't enough to convince them that the computer had got it wrong. "No one should be treated like a criminal due to a computer error," he said. He is right, and that is not an abstract civil liberties argument; that is a man stopped in the street, unable to talk his way out of an algorithm's mistake, because the officers in front of him trusted a machine more than they trusted him.

This is the quiet shift that the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade never quite addresses. The question has never been whether you personally have something to hide. The question is what happens when the system decides, wrongly, that you do. In that moment, the burden of proof silently inverts. You are no longer innocent until proven guilty. You are a false positive, trying to talk your way back to being a citizen.

Let's be honest about what "targeted, intelligence-led and time-bound" deployments really look like on a Saturday afternoon in Croydon or Camden. A van parks up, cameras scan every face that walks past, yours, mine, the person pushing a pram, the teenager on his way home from football. Most of those faces will be discarded. But every single one will have been read. That is not targeted policing in any meaningful sense of the word, it is a dragnet with a friendlier name.

Supporters will point out, fairly, that facial recognition has helped arrest genuinely dangerous people. That is true. It is also true that the same argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would justify cameras in every living room in the country. The test of a policing power in a free society is not whether it occasionally catches the guilty, but whether the price paid by the innocent is proportionate, transparent and genuinely accountable.

On that test, we are nowhere near ready. There is still no specific statute governing the use of live facial recognition in the United Kingdom. No Act of Parliament has been passed setting out who can use it, when, under what oversight, and what redress is available when it goes wrong. Instead, we have force policies, Home Office assurances, and a High Court judgment which, read carefully, says only that the current arrangements are not unlawful, not that they are wise, proportionate, or fit for national rollout.

There is a world of difference between "the police may do this" and "the police should do this everywhere." The court answered the first question; Parliament has barely begun to address the second.

If ministers genuinely believe the public has nothing to fear, they should have no objection to putting that belief to the democratic test. Bring forward primary legislation. Set the thresholds for watchlist inclusion in statute. Mandate independent audits of accuracy rates and publish them, broken down by ethnicity and gender, because we already know the technology performs unevenly across different faces. Create a proper, funded route to redress when someone like Shaun Thompson is wrongly stopped.

Do those things, and the conversation changes. Skip them, and you are not rolling out a crime-fighting tool. You are rolling out surveillance infrastructure and hoping nobody notices until it's too embedded to remove.

The High Court has told us that what is happening is lawful. That is not the same as telling us it is right. Britain has, historically, been rather good at distinguishing between the two. It would be a quiet tragedy to forget how.

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Dean Dunham KC presents LBC's Consumer Hour every Sunday from 9pm-10pm.

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