Credit: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In an interview with Tony Blair, Ms Mahmood — who served as the UK’s justice secretary from July 2024 to September 2025 — said her vision in that role was to “achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon”.

The panopticon was proposed in the 18th century as a more effective prison, designed in a circular layout allowing guards to observe every prisoner at all times.

Ms Mahmood has appeared to suggest that the concept could be extended to society writ large. Her vision was “that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”, she said.

She also spoke of ways to integrate AI into policing beyond live facial recognition technology.

“I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do,” she said.

Last August, the UK government announced plans for a pilot scheme which will use AI to “detect, track and predict where devastating knife crime is likely to occur” — drawing comparisons to the sci-fi thriller Minority Report.

Baroness Chakrabarti, a Labour peer and former director of civil liberties and human rights group Liberty, last night said in the Lords that she assumed the quotes from Ms Mahmood were “fake news” when she saw them circulating on social media.

“I cannot believe that from a Labour cabinet minister, even from a home secretary,” she said.

Lord Katz, responding on behalf of the government, said there was no plan to introduce “mass surveillance of the population”.

He noted that Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018 “places a range of obligations on law enforcement, including requirements that law enforcement processing of data must be necessary and proportionate, for a specific purpose and not excessive”.