A First: Blair’s Britain to Monitor Every Car Journey

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

LONDON (The Independent) Dec. 22 — 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.

  ««  click on pic for info Menwith Hill

UKUSA 1988 – Silkworth – Moonpenny – Sire – Runway – Steeplebush – Big Bird

By March 2006, 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.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. “Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism. The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don’t have access to. It’s part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we’d be negligent.”  

Data Protection Act 1998

Big Brother UK ◊ by IdiotSavant @EuroTrib

The UK is already one of the world’s worst surveillance societies, with an unparalleled number of video cameras watching citizens as they go about their daily business. And now, it’s about to get worse.

The Home Office has announced plans for a national surveillance system to record the movements of every vehicle on Britain’s roads. Because most people use cars, this means that they will effectively be monitoring the movements of every British citizen.

But this isn’t just about collecting video footage – they’ll be using automatic number-plate recognition software – currently successfully being used to enforce London’s traffic congestion charge – to build a database of every vehicle’s movements for two years.

The application is of course data mining – not just tracking the movements of specific vehicles (and therefore individuals), but which vehicles they were driving with, and of course patterns of travel.

Re: Big Brother UK

Ironically, the worst first set of CCTV was sold to us as protection from terra… After IRA bombs in the City of London, a “cordon of security” was implemented.

Technology has advanced and now apart from recording (which on a public street is perhaps easier to slide by the public) they can do automatic number-plate recognition.

The horrible question is, how long until face recognition becomes viable?

by Metatone on Thu Dec 22nd, 2005 at 12:43:55 AM PDT



Surveillance Technologies

London: Face Recognition Implemented

Home Office – Intrusive Surveillance  

Britain’s police look set to be the first in the world to be equipped with a new “spy on the street” security camera system, which can recognise the faces of crime suspects and alert officers within seconds.

The system is capable of checking 1,000 faces every second, and its developers say it can see through disguises like hats, glasses and facial hair. But civil rights campaigners today warned that the computer-based “facial mapping” system – known as Mandrake (1998) – may lead to an increase in wrongful arrests, as innocent people are mistaken for villains.

Report to the Director General for Research of the European Parliament
– Scientific and Technical Options Assessment programme office –
on the development of surveillance technology and risk of abuse of economic information.

This study considers the state of the art in COMmunications INTelligence COMINT of
automated processing for intelligence purposes of intercepted broadband multi-language leased or
common carrier systems, and its applicability to COMINT targeting and selection, including speech recognition.

Report by : Duncan Campbell, IPTV Ltd
Edinburgh, Scotland : April, 1999