Britain will monitor every car journey

Found on The Independent on Wednesday, 21 December 2005
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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.

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.

"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," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"We need this to fight terrorism". Oh yes, those terrorists possibly couldn't remove or change numberplates. They just need to pull aside for a few minutes. Soon they will give database access to marketing people who then can create consumer profiles and so on. Who is the bigger threat? A person who blows up 10 people, or a country who monitors every citizen? Remember that the terrorists in question tend to blow themselves up, so you could only track their body-parts. Thank you, Big Brother and a Happy New Year.