MI5 will soon be able to monitor everywhere you go in a car, as Britain's road users become the most watched drivers on the planet, thanks to a country-wide surveillance scheme, coming soon to a road near you.
The road-side ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras that are being installed, together with a central database that's being installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will be able to capture 35 million number-plates daily. It'll store the time, date and GPS-determined location. Initially, this information will be stored for two years, with plans to expand that to five.
The scheme has the full backing of the Government, and is to cost some £42 million in hardware this year alone -- although previous experience of public sector IT projects suggests that this cost could easily and quickly balloon.
PistonHeads has reported the precursors to this in earlier stories (see links below).
What's more disturbing is that police chiefs are about to forge agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to include their CCTV cameras in the national network. So even if you're off-road, you'll be spotted and someone, somewhere -- including MI5 -- will be able to figure out when and where you've been.
It doesn't stop there. The system will also be able to recognise what are called associated vehicles -- or vehicles travelling in convoy, which is alleged to be a way of catching criminals who travel together.
Will it bring the benefits it's supposed to? Maybe -- it'll depend on the intelligence behind the database. But connected databases have a habit of being broken into. And there will be considerable incentive for many individuals and groups to hack into this one, thereby compromising data that ought to be private.
And while the official justification for all this is anti-terrorism and crackdowns on uninsured drivers and other miscreants, it raises huge civil liberties issues -- such as the question of whether the loss of them on this scale is justified by the gains -- yet that's not a debate that's being aired.
Instead, the officials are quietly getting on with using our money to watch us.
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