Faceless Threats Send London's DIY Crime-Fighting Facial Recognition Experiment Offline

British police aren't alone in their massive effort to dig through hours of CCTV footage and photographs to identify the rowdy crowds wrecking havoc in London and Manchester: they've got hackers. Adapting some of the techniques used in the wake of the Vancouver riots, various groups of coders are building tools and using message boards to crowd-source the identification of rioters who’ve been captured on camera.

But unsurprisingly, not everyone is pleased with these little experiments in crowd-sourced vigilante justice. .

“Some of us have received threats,” said a spokesman for the Google Group London Riots Facial Recognition in a statement to Motherboard. He asked not to be named. “At the moment we’re not doing interviews or discussing specific areas of the project … partly out of a concern for our own safety.”

"It's a very sensitive issue and our aim is to experiment with technology, not to get involved in a social and ethical argument," said the spokesperson, who also asked for anonymity for all of the group’s members. "We will be closing down the public group soon so that we can concentrate on the work at hand."

• Connections: The Cop iPhone App That Knows Your Face and Can Send You to Jail; VBS.TV: Hackney: Systems Overload

While the group builds and uses facial recognition technology to ID the pillagers and troublemakers exposed in online photographs, it says it’s also attempting to highlight and address the relatively new ethical questions raised by the technology, questions that have plagued Facebook in recent weeks. The same questions could also impact American police precincts, which are readying to adopt an iPhone app that can cross-check a person’s face against criminal records.

Despite its Orwellian-sounding name, “London Riots Facial Recognition” isn’t sinister, it says, despite what Reddit users may think. They’re simply hackers trying to make the fractured system of massive perp identification work better. Discussion in the group reportedly began with a focus on technical issues, but its participants have also honed in on the legal concerns.

"We're just a bunch of computer programmers who want to use technology to try and help the situation," the group said. "There's not much more to it at the moment, at least not yet. We really do just want to take a step back out of the public eye and continue experimenting with these technologies. Nothing we do will involve illegal methods to gather data. We're not out to do any harm here. :)"

The group’s statement contained a list of points:

• We have no ties with the government or the police
• We’re a distributed group of programmers who just want to help out by using technology
• Nothing we do will involve using illegal methods to gather data
• We are aware of the ethical issues surrounding the use of facial recognition in this way and part of our project is to try and highlight and deal with those issues
• The results of our work will never be used to incriminate anybody directly
• The tool is merely something that will help narrow down who the rioters might be
• It’s up to the police to find the evidence and convict people
• We are only using the CCTV photos released publicly by the police

As the Google group goes private and focuses on refining their methods, a few other social networking sites are still providing a goldmine of data for Scotland Yard. The @RiotCleanup Twitter which has accumulated just over 87,000 followers, riotcleanup.co.uk, allows citizens to upload photos while constantly updating various cleanup sites, zavilia.com is reporting crowd-sourced IDs to the police, and Catch a Looter, is the Tumblr community’s effort at eyeballing rioters.

If technology helped fan the flames of revolution in the Arab Spring, the riots in the UK are a nice reminder that it can work the other way too. Still, the do-gooding face-analyzers have their work cut out for them, if another set of data is any indication: according to Gawker's Adrian Chen, at Amazon.uk, sales of aluminum baseball bats have gone up by 5,000 percent in just 24 hours.

- Kimberly Haddad