Read My Lips: Britain is a Police State

Wired | April 27, 2007

This "British Police State" theme we have going here at the Gadget Lab is starting to get genuinely scary. Now the Home Office in England are developing lip reading cameras. It's software based so theoretically could be applied to every one of the millions of cameras in Britain. From Sci Fi Tech:

Once it finds someone speaking certain key words or sentences, the system would automatically send an alert message to a central console, mobile phone, or other communications device. Police or security agents could then be dispatched to the scene to question the individual.
Feeling uncomfortable yet? Richard Harvey of University of East Anglia in Norwich, England has received a £391,814 grant to develop the system, which is based on existing speech recognition technology. Start counting, Brits. You have three years to get out.

Lip-Reading Technology Knows What You Said [Electronic Design via SCI FI Tech]