INDIA - Facial Recognition Challenged

Police officers move past Ikshana, a mobile surveillance van, parked at the ongoing protest site, days after thousands of the supporters of India’s Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) marched towards parliament demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over National Eligibility.

The surveillance controversy erupted during [the] student protest over exam paper leaks, when demonstrators posted pictures on social media of a mobile police surveillance van equipped with cameras on a telescopic mast providing a 360-degree view of the gathering.

India has no law governing the use of facial recognition technology by police and surveillance at the main protest site in New Delhi was a breach of the law, activists say.

Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi-based digital advocacy group, wrote to Delhi’s police commissioner on July 24 demanding the deletion of ‌biometric data ⁠collected at the protest site.

When a Reuters reporter walked past the van, one computer display inside showed his face with a green rectangular box around it and a “face accuracy” match metric next to it. Soon after, a police officer inside shut the van’s window.

“The computers here help us identify those who have a criminal history and it highlights them,” police officer Raj Kumar Dahiya told Reuters.

-www.reuters.com, 27 July 2026

Commentary: Regarding international law, the New York State Bar Association writes: “Facial recognition is not governed by a single global law; legality varies significantly by region. In the European Union, the EU AI Act heavily restricts mass surveillance and live facial recognition. In the USA, there is no overarching federal law, resulting in a fragmented landscape of state-level regulations and local bans. Other regions, like Australia, have recently allowed commercial scanning under certain transparency conditions.”

Technology develops faster than lawmakers are able to regulate it.

Research shows that the first time large-scale facial recognition was used was in January 2001 at the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida. During that event, law enforcement could monitor and recognize some 100,000 attendees. The reason? Security!

In India’s case, as the article states, “The computers here help us identify those who have a criminal history.”

Doubtless, this technology will advance. There is much more facial recognition employed than we may even be aware of, including supermarkets, banks, etc.

When reading the Bible, we know that the apostle Paul stated that he was a Roman citizen. He did not have to present an identity document but only gave his word. That changed when “letters of passage” were issued during medieval times.

Later in 1920, the League of Nations at their landmark conference in Paris, adopted a standardized, modern, multi-page passport booklet. That already is to a large extent outdated. On a recent return to the US, the traveler had to face a camera. The passport will be a thing of the past in the not-too-distant future.

This reminds us of Revelation 13, where a sophisticated AI image is apparently capable of recognizing true worshipers of Antichrist and non-worshipers. Welcome to the new age!

(See End-Times Super Trends, Item #2342, $15.99.)