Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

George Orwell was a Brit, right?  It looks like he understood very well the
mentality of his countrymen.

Richard

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article334686.ece

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey 
> From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car
will be monitored 
By Steve Connor, Science Editor 
Published: 22 December 2005 

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.

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.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the
movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded
and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a
sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation
designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to
gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised
gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers
(Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the
spending of £24m this year on equipment.

...

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