22 December, 2005
This is WRONG
The Independent reports a story so bad I found it literally nauseating. However, it's a little odd that neither the BBC nor the Guardian, news sources I tend to trust (in as much as I trust any mass-medium), mention it at all.
The article claims that from next year every single journey by every single car in the UK will be monitored by the state.
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate 'reads' per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
Does anyone even
care about individual liberty?
Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting. [It is said that] this development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis.
**** the convenience for the police – this is wrong. I can appreciate that detection of crime is difficult. Tough. Freedom is always more important, even if that makes life difficult for the police. I believe that apart from in political contexts, the UK police generally do well already, and consequently their powers and resources should not be extended.
The state exists to serve the people, never the reverse. It is my fundamental belief that the state should not have detailed knowledge of individual citizens. To say this is going too far is like saying the Atlantic Ocean is a bit damp. I was going to make a flippant comment such as "what's next? Subcutaneous GPS implants?", but suddenly that's not so inconceivable a leap.
Let's be clear: this isn't surveillance of convicted criminals, nor even of previously-identified criminal suspects (and whose standards define 'suspicious'?), but everyone. Millions of people, law-abiding or otherwise, will soon be routinely monitored, with logs of our movements stored in a central database for years.
The article focuses on reduction of car crime, but it would be all too easy to target legal but 'inconvenient' dissenters. What are the chances of a car logged as having been in the vicinity of one protest event being turned away by police on the way to another protest? The Independent happens to mention, without elaboration or comment, the fascinating claim that MI5 (the UK's domestic intelligence service – some might over-dramatically call MI5 'the secret police') will also use the database for purposes that even a Chief Constable (regional police chief) doesn't know about.
Posted by Ministry at 15:37
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