Smart Cities Exposed: London’s Secretive “Smart Stations” Roll-Out

The digital slave-system of the Fourth Industrial Repression is being imposed on us by stealth.

Various aspects of the sinister technology have gradually crept in over the years under the excuse of fighting crime or terrorism or, more recently, of combating the spread of a so-called pandemic.

As we saw in our recent article on “15 Minute Cities”, we are now being told that it is all about urban planning and making life generally more pleasant for everyone by reducing traffic congestion and pollution.

Anyone who sees through this greenwashing attempt is dismissed as a paranoid fool or as a dangerous conspiracy theorist spreading fear and disinformation.

And yet the whole premise of this official spin is blown out of the water by the fact that smart infrastructure (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is being rolled out in contexts that have nothing to do with private vehicle use.

We have got hold of a very interesting document from Transport for London on the current testing of smart surveillance at Willesden Green tube station, which is due to continue until March 31, 2023.

If this project were really about “providing the best possible service” to passengers on the British capital’s underground railway network, as claimed, then you would think that it would be loudly and proudly announced and discussed, with information widely available in a democratic public consultation.

But the fact that the document, entitled “Smart Station Proof Concept”, is marked “restricted” for internal TfL use reveals the secrecy being deployed to sneak through this new stage of the incremental theft of our freedom.

In the public interest, we have decided to publicise its contents.

The “exciting” project for the Jubilee Line station combines existing CCTV cameras with “visual analytics technology” to provide 24-hour real-time monitoring, via a “Smart Stations Dashboard”.

As well as counting everyone entering and leaving the station, the smart spies will be issuing “notifications” for a range of “triggers” including not just gate-jumping or smoking, but also “loitering” or a “person sat on a bench (Excessive Time)”, which turns out to be anything more than ten minutes!

The document reveals that this will be achieved by identifying body language, movement, behaviour and “some protected characteristics”, which apparently include disability, age and pregnancy/maternity.

But don’t worry: “All identification is performed in accordance with our data protection impact assessment and equality impact assessment”.

The document is disingenuous when it declares that the “smart station” system will allow TfL to “deliver an even more attentive service to Customers. We will have 24 more sets of eyes watching for incidents 24/7/365” and in claiming that “Smart Station technology will not replace station staff”.

One of the main purposes of 4IR technology, as famously championed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, is to get rid of pesky, demanding and expensive human employees. In the longer term, the robot “eyes” at tube stations are designed to replace most of the human ones, rather than to add to them.

Even more concerning is the agenda that lies behind digital facial recognition.

It is stressed that, in the Willesden Green trial, this aspect of the smart project is not being activated, but with the Chinese-style technology already in place elsewhere on the London transport network, this looks like a time-buying “frog-boiling” manoeuvre.

As specific individuals are apparently not being traced, the document insists that the “most protected characteristics” will not be identified.

It lists these as including “gender, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race (ethnicity), religion and belief, sexual orientation”.

But the very fact that the category of “most protected characteristics” exists and has been carefully defined, only to be specifically excluded from this particular trial, merely confirms that it forms part of the totalitarian tracking involved with the full facial-recognition version that will eventually be unleashed everywhere.

And the prospect of real-time surveillance which monitors people in terms of these particular categories suggests an entirely predictable link to UNSDG-based impact capitalism, the 21st century digital slave-system which is in fact the driving force behind the whole smart cities agenda.

As we wrote in 2021, the aim is to create a “digital twin” of each and every one of us, stored on blockchain and allowing financial interests to commodify, and speculate upon, our lives.

For this, they need total real-time surveillance of all our movements and interactions, via 5G or 6G.

They want to shunt us into “a world of geofencing and e-carceration, of facial recognition and predictive policing, of biometric data and sensor networks, of behavioural insights and eugenics, of nudging and shaping, of the internet of things and the internet of bodies”, we warned.

Three “technology partners” for the Smart Stations project are named in the document.

One of these is Virgin Media/02, the London-based telecommunications giant jointly owned by British-Dutch-American multinational Liberty Global and Spain’s Telefónica, which are both World Economic Forum partners.

Another is Telent, which describes itself as “a leading technology company and specialist in the design, build, support and management of the UK’s critical digital infrastructure”.

Its Chief Technical Officer, Gerard Donohue, nicely sets out the overall plan when he writes of a “new dynamic” based on “Smart Cities, autonomous vehicles and the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT)”.

He adds: “As these environs emerge in the 21st century, this means that physical infrastructure such as roads, rail and pathways become a pivotal asset in ensuring this can be achieved.

“This next generation of mobile and connectivity will be delivered by 5G technology – the enabler for higher quality, content rich data services.

“Many more new 5G base stations will need to be deployed to match the coverage of existing networks – this is the challenge. The most notable difference between 4G and 5G will be that 5G will act as a gateway for IoT applications delivering the scale and breadth of connected users (human and machine) that can be met on a global scale”.

And the third partner is Integration Wizards, which was also involved in the Covid-pretexted phase of the global techno-fascist acceleration, in the shape of “face mask compliance”, “social distance monotoring” and a “face-recognition attendance app”.

The firm is now part of sparkcognition, a US business which openly boasts that its aim is to “power an industrial metaverse“.

The agenda is clear.

The very fact that it is being hidden from us shows that the Global Public Private Partnership knows full well that it is not something we welcome.

It is up to us to convert their fake “democracy” into a reality by refusing to go along with it.

We urgently need to jump off the technological train transporting us, through a dark tunnel of deception, towards a grim future of digital concentration camps.