Detectable Advantages

London's railway stations have been privileged to host the latest glorious manifestation of technological Britishness, namely the automation of witness unreliability. Six months and three hundred thousand in taxpaers' money were spent on a trial of surveillance equipment which scans faces for comparison against a police blacklist. The equipment recognised one single face, and did so incorrectly; hence the trial has been extended another four months and allowed to metastasize onto the Underground. Fortunately, Britain's leading liberal newspaper reports as a fact that the aim of the exercise is to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders; so the throwing of taxpayers' money at profit-making snooper companies must indubitably, as always, be purely secondary and entirely incidental.