UK Commissioner Who Pushed Controversial Facewatch Tech Leaves Post To… Work For Facewatch

Call it regulatory capture." Call it the revolving door." Just don't call it acceptable.

At best, moves like this give an appearance of impropriety. At best, that's what they do. At worst, they look like what they almost always are: government officials moving directly to the positions within the industry they just recently regulated, carrying with them family photos, desk decorations, and a file box full of conflicted interests.

Things look mighty conflicted here, even though the commissioner who passed through the revolving door on the way to his private sector office claims there's nothing wrong with what he did. Mark Townsend has the details for The Guardian.

In a move critics have dubbed an outrageous conflict of interest",Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joinedFacewatchas a non-executive director.

Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, withCompanies Houserecords showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November. Campaigners claim this might mean he was negotiating his Facewatch contract while in post, and have urged the advisory committee on business appointments to investigate if it may have compromised his work in public office". It is understood that the committee is currently considering the issue.

Facewatch - like all facial recognition tech - is controversial. Even in a nation inundated with surveillance cameras and facial recognition programs, Facewatch drew more opposition than most. Adding to this controversy is the fact that the UK Home Office was less than subtle in its, shall we say, suggestion that the Information Commissioner's Office come down on the side of the Home Office and its preferred tech provider.

Correspondence reveals that the Home Office wrote to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warning that policing minister, Chris Philp, would write to your commissioner" if the regulator's investigation into Facewatch - whosefacial recognition camerashave provoked huge opposition after being installed in shops - was not positive towards the firm.

An official from the Home Office's data and identity directorate warned the ICO: If you are about to do something imminently in Facewatch's favour then I should be able to head that off [Philp's intervention], otherwise we will just have to let it take its course."

The apparent threat came two days after a closed-door meeting on 8 March between Philp, senior Home Office officials andFacewatch.

Those emails were sent in early March. By the end of the month, ICO had completed its investigation of Facewatch and its tech, declaring it to be suitable for public deployment in the interest of detection and prevention of crime." When confronted about the emails and any effect that might have played in its decision, ICO claimed the implicit threats had not altered the course of its investigation.

But that's not the only correspondence involving Facewatch. Other emails showed the policing minister assuring Facewatch it had his full support and that he would continue to push" the facial recognition agenda forward." As critics noted then, the policing minister sounded more like Facewatch's PR rep than a public servant.

Now, there's this: an actual public servant who pushed for Facewatch deployment moving on from public oversight of this tech to working directly for a (contested) subject of his former regulatory work.

Sampson, for his part, claims he's done nothing wrong.

Sampson said that after the government proposed abolishing his post, hewrote publiclyto the home secretary on 1 August, giving three months' notice, after which he received a formal approach to join Facewatch. I notified the Home Office and put in place specific measures to ensure the avoidance of any potential conflict of interest, however limited that potential might be. I am satisfied that no such conflict arose," said Sampson.

What those specific measures" were are left to the reader's imagination. Sampson did not provide any details of the supposed three month firewall he erected between the tech company he regulated and his remaining work for the UK government. The wall must have been pretty thin, though, seeing as it only took one day to exit the public sector and step into a high-ranking position at Facewatch.

Even if this is all on the up-and-up, as Sampson claims, the optics are still horrible. The public does not approve of this sort of thing. The only people that seem to think it's acceptable are the company executives and public officials that hop in the revolving door as soon as it starts spinning. Facewatch wants a little regulatory capture. With Sampson, it has reeled in a keeper: a former public employee with connections and knowledge of the sector. And all it had to do was pitch him a job as soon as it knew he might be looking for one.