AI bots might put security of undercover cops in danger by revealing their true identities
Undercover police officers work under false names with a fake backstory, but one ex-top cop fears their safety could be compromised by AI scraping the internet for their photos
Neil Basu, former head of counter terror at the Met(Image: PA)
AI chatbots pose a risk to the safety of undercover cops as they could reveal their true identity, a former top cop has warned. The Met’s ex-head of counter terrorism Neil Basu fears facial recognition and image matching could give away plain clothes bobbies.
A number of AI applications can match a human face from a digital image by scraping the internet for a likeness. And the former senior officer said undercover officers need to be extra careful to protect their backstory on cases, especially when off-duty.
When asked if undercover officers are worried if advances to AI could could lead them to being identified, he said: “They should be because ever since undercover detectives were invented, they’ve had to have some sort of backstory or some kind of legend.”
Speaking on the Crime Agents podcast, he warned that given how much of our lives we share online, photographs of undercover police officers could be uploaded to AI to scrape the internet and reveal their true identity.
He said: “The potential for AI to join all of the dots across multiple AI platforms, including your pseudonym and photograph, put it all together and give somebody an idea this isn’t the person they say they are has got to be a real possibility.
“So you’ve got say covert policing has got to be better than that. The people who design the legends and put them together have to be better than that. But most importantly, the undercover officers themselves have to be more disciplined than they’ve ever been.”
Neil, who left the Met in 2022, added: “The reality is it’s very easy to slip up when you’re off duty. So for every UCO (undercover officer) and everyone who does plain clothes work, be careful.”
He added that AI could also potentially become the “bedrock of productivity and efficiency” in policing. We previously told how AI-powered traffic cameras have caught drivers on phones by scanning the inside of vehicles and alert police to wrongdoing.
And Sir Mark Rowley last week said local policing needed to have access to the “best modern technology” as he heralded a new age reminiscent of sci-fi film Robocop.
Last year Mark Williams-Thomas, whose work exposed Jimmy Savile as a monster, told us that he reckons AI would solve one of the world’s biggest mysteries, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
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