In the ongoing efforts to make the world a safer place, governments are turning to technology to replace fallible and inefficient human operatives. They’ll surely be interested in the efforts of Australian scientists to develop algorithms to detect “unusual behaviour in an open environment” in video surveillance footage. While the aim is basically laudable, one can’t help but wonder how error-prone these systems will be (given the poor success rates of facial recognition software here in the UK), and what misuse such technology might be put to by unscrupulous governments or corporations.