Big Brother is watching you on the road.

[Soapy Sam]

This BBC news item describes the new (ish) network of number plate reading cameras covering British roads.

Jacqui Smith says it's all fine, and we can trust Jacqui.

She wouldn't lie, would she?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/whos_watching_you/8064333.stm

Opinions?

 

[andyandy]

I watched the BBC program on this on the same day that over a dozen NHS trust were reprimanded over losing patients' confidential data, and it was revealed that highly personal details on 500 RAF senior personnel were on a lost computer hard drive. Given that the current MP hysteria was caused by inadequate data security you do wonder what it's going to take to make politicians realise that central databases have the potential to cause more problems than they solve.

With regards to the new technology, the police will now have access to every journey made on every major road with every time logged and stored for two years. Every Internet site visited is stored, every e-mail and text message sent recoverable, every mobile phone a GPS positioning system. The big danger for civil liberties is the tie-up between the different surveillance techniques. With the introduction of ID cards this will be rapidly accelerated, indeed providing an almost complete ability to monitor every aspect of a person's movement, purchases and communications. The checks and balances which currently restrict such police surveillance to serious criminals will be significantly weakened.

Who will watch the watchman?

 

[DC]

with that you can watch Big Brother on the road

 

[JoeyDonuts]

Why somebody would watch the unbridled stupification that is Big Brother, I have no idea. And I work for a CBS affiliate - so I have no choice to watch it for no other reason but to assure it remains on the air.

So...Jacqui Smith's the source for this, right? Is this the same woman who thought Cannibal Holocaust was an actual snuff film?

 

[INRM]

I think the government is getting really way too intrusive lately

 

[tyr_13]

Cameras? Taking pictures? In public places? I demand privacy on my public roads.

Wait, why should we care? The government knows your plate anyway. Are we supposed to be afraid that the government might know where we were?

 

[Marquis de Carabas]

I hope someone's told McCartney.

 

[Fnord]

Pips ... Pearpoint ... Inex/Zamir ... Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has been around for a decade or so. People want it to be able to scan libraries of data into digital storage, without merely taking a picture, and without a lot of errors. Now it's being applied to reading 7 alphanumeric characters at a time whizzing by at 65 miles per hour.

What did they expect? Sooner or later, every form of technology gets adapted for use by governmental agencies to better monitor or and/or control its citizens. It would not surprise me at all if it could be proven that those electronic voting machines take a picture of the voter as he or she presses that "Accept" button, and then stores that image along with the ballot - not that I'm saying that they, but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[I Ratant]

...
With regards to the new technology, the police will now have access to every journey made on every major road with every time logged and stored for two years. Every Internet site visited is stored, every e-mail and text message sent recoverable, every mobile phone a GPS positioning system. The big danger for civil liberties is the tie-up between the different surveillance techniques. With the introduction of ID cards this will be rapidly accelerated, indeed providing an almost complete ability to monitor every aspect of a person's movement, purchases and communications. The checks and balances which currently restrict such police surveillance to serious criminals will be significantly weakened.

Who will watch the watchman?

.
Who is going to look at ALL of that crap?
There can't enough civil servants on the planet to look at everything all the time!

 

[jasonpatterson]

I don't know what to think about this.

On one hand, this type of system has the potential to be VERY useful in some situations: Divorced parents kidnapping children, locating criminals quickly, all sorts of things of that nature. Additionally, analysis of the data independent of identification could be used to improve traffic flow and the like.

On the other hand: It's not too hard to imagine abuse of the system, those with access, legitimate or otherwise, could track their spouses, the government could track its 'enemies' that sort of thing.

The system almost certainly would be abused to some degree, I guess it's a question of whether the good in it outweighs the bad.

 

[Fnord]

OCR tech allows for a governmental agency to flag a specific license plate for attention, or to simply record how many times a specific license plate has passed a specific location, along with the time and date.

 

[I Ratant]

And it will be possible to halt any potential car chase by remotely turning off the ignition in the suspect vehicle.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Yeah, but they can't switch off my grenade launcher!