UK To Passively Monitor Every Vehicle

DrSkwid writes "The UK Police are building a network to monitor the movement of every vehicle in the U.K. through an extensive Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system. The data will be retained for 2 years. The Register further reports that the system will likely be used for issuing speeding fines." From the article: "The primary aims claimed for the system are tackling untaxed and uninsured vehicles, stolen cars and the considerably broader one of 'denying criminals the use of the roads.' But unless the Times has got the spacing wrong, having one every quarter of a mile on motorways quite clearly means they'll be used to enforce speed limits as well, which would effectively make the current generation of Gatsos obsolete. Otherwise, checking a vehicle's tax and insurance status every 15 seconds or thereabouts would seem overkill."

Comments

Another reason

[VJ42]

Yet another reason for me to want to emigrate from the UK, what with ID cards, and 90 days detention without trial etc.(Thankfully the latter was defeated in parliment). At this rate, with ever more draconian laws I'll be able to claim asylum.

Re:Another reason

[dfjunior]

I didn't say come to the U.S., I said have a revolution.

Re:Another reason

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You're more likely to persuade people to vote for you than fight for you.

Unfortunately, as the UK system so kindly demonstrated a few months ago, a "democracy" can still be a place where winning the support of only 22% of the population eligible to vote (and only thirtysomething percent of those who actually did vote), not to mention losing the popular vote in the largest single country in the union (England), is still enough to get you a comfortable absolute majority in parliament, with which you can pass any laws you want (assuming they even need new laws, rather than conveniently circumventing parliamentary scrutiny as this measure has, and assuming that your own party don't finally give in to the truly absurd and rebel against you for the first time in three administrations, only to cave in on the overall principle half an hour later anyway).

Constitution or revolution, place bets now.

Re:Another reason

[drsquare]

The American revolution got rid of the old government and replaced it with one that's even worse, so what benefit would we have to having a revolution?

If anyone in Britain actually gave a shit, and actually thought about what the government was doing rather than reading the opinions from The Sun, it would be easier to vote in a better government than having a revolution.

But when a party can gain absolute power with 35% of the vote, it seems democracy is broken.

Kinda Cool, Kinda weird

[ViperG]

I remember seeing something like this technology being tested with police. They setup a unit like this (might be the same thing) on a busy road. Anyways, a few hours later, the system caught a few stolen cars, speeders, and few other things, that led to a record number of arrests that day.

Kinda werid though, for some reason it reminds me of 1984.

Re:I predict...

[MightyMartian]

I've always felt that if the government wants to put us under that much surveillance, then I think we should have surveillance on the politicians that give the thumbs up to these proposals, the people that administer the system and the people that access. They should be forced to wear microphones, they should be monitored, with their every move accessible by the public.

If they really feel that privacy is an extinguishable notion, then they should be the ones to suffer that loss of it the very most. If they are unwilling to put up with this intrusion, then they can bloody well stop demanding intrusions on the common citizen.

The only thing I have a problem with

[Bazzalisk]

is keeping the records for two years - I can't see any good reason for that. The cameras themselves aren't much different from the camera system already used to maintain the congestuion charge in central london and are overall a Good Thing. (As a cyclist I find that the largest regular threat to my life tends to originate from speeding/incompetent motorists - and I want them to be caught and have their licenses revoked)

Why is speeding a crime?

[Transcendent]

What I don't understand is why speeding is so strictly enforced with this system. It's an entirely arbitrary system (well, loosely based on some aspect of the road) that is outdated for current car designs. Do you think my 1,500lb escort should have the same speed limit as some guys 2 ton '88 Cadillac, or an H2? Should I be forced to drive at the same speed as a senile senior citizen?

What about other circumstances where I sped up to avoid an accident, or to avoid further traffic congestion (as in moving into place to merge into an open spot rather than having 10 people brake behind you)?

Not new - already in use

[mustafap]

This has already been reported by the bbc ( more reliable than The Register ) where a camera has been used to record car licence plates on entry to a car park, and generate automatic fines if a matching parking ticket was not purchased.

The system failed miserably because it falsely recorded cars *passing by* the car park.

It's a real intrusion, but on the other hand, try getting compensation if you are in an accident with someone driving without insurance.

I'll stick to monitoring speed cameras :o)

Circumvention

[ktappe]

I see a sudden market emerging for adhesive tape for modifying license plate numbers/letters to confuse the cameras. WIth little effort 5's make great 6's, 0's and 3's transmogrify into 8's, C's become 0's. And suddenly your car becomes anonymous. *cough* Not that I advocate this of course. -Kurt

do, or do not, there is no try

[PMuse]

Could the stated goals not be acheived more cheaply simply by fitting each vehicle with a transponder? Anything that must be installed every quarter mile of every road will necessarily be ungodly expensive.

Vehicles operating without a transponder would be fined steeply. A few random checks would ensure compliance.

It's one thing to be an evil overlord, but there's no excuse for being an expensive and incompetent evil overlord.

Nah, bollocks

[Cally]

Sorry, I'm a big Register fan, but they're wrong about this. It's not going to happen. Consider that the existing old-skool 'GATSOs' are now pretty universally revived and being deactivated (latest snippet was research demonstrating dangerous bunching on the M4 where they were introduced as a trial.) I drive past 2 or 3 on my daily commute, virtually always over the speed limit, and I've driven round the SE and London - been flashed once or twice but never fined, and these days I don't even get flashed.

Bear in mind that Blair's ability to railroad through deeply unpopular legislation is seriously damaged after losing the "90 days" vote last week. The PLP are restive and not likely to rubberstamp deeply unpopular legislation.

I've been had by the London congestion charge system many times, which is always a pain but overall I don't moan about it because it's a Good Thing to ration traffic in central london (for lots of reasons.) That argument won't wash outside of city centres though.

Variable speed limits

[amembleton]

It seems that the reason why they want a camera every 400 yards is so that they can enforce variable speed limits. From the article: "400 yards along motorways, and a trial on the M42 near Birmingham will first be used to enforce variable speed limits".

I last drove along the M42 just over a week ago, and there are plenty of new temporary speed limit signs, one above each lane. These were in use to slow the traffic down to help remove a traffic jam. It seems that all of this has been put in with the intention of these camera trials.

Personally, I think this is a good idea. Variable speed limits might help to curb congestion, especially on the M42 which regularly gets jammed with traffic going to the NEC and the many motorways that connect to it. We have had variable speed limits in the UK for a while now, but everyone (including the police) ignores them.

In the UK, driving is a privilage and not a right. You are issued with a licence which of course can be revoked by a court. A lot of speed limits do seem like BS, and the motorway speed limit IMHO ought to be 80, but if everyone is doing the same speed things might be safer.

The only problem I have with this, is that they want to hold the records for two years. Why? This will probably get tied into our expensive ID cards. Might be time to migrate.

Re:I predict...

[DrSkwid]

Even as the poster of this story, I'm with you.

Information wants to be free and all that.

I think we should all have access to all the CCTV cameras.

In Ian M. Bank's sci-fi books, the culture have droids that will follow you and record your every details so you can watch it later, and that other people can have access to. You can turn them off but people in The Culture generally have nothing to hide. If your citizens are hiding stuff, you're society is wrong :)

Re:What's a Gatso?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, do the British really have that big of a speeding problem? I mean, sometimes you have to speed up to pass a car or something. I'm not a crazy driver, but I think I'd still be getting tickets in the mail every day.

Truth about TAX in UK

[nottoogeeky]

UK is in a bad state right now. all this is, is an extra tax for us to pay! Debt in the UK is crazy!!! and you know why?.......because everyday wages don't actually pay for what the UK government takes away from you. I worked out, for about every £100 you earn, you only see around £15-£20. Why? What we call stealth taxes! wait...i can have 4 kids, sit on my ass all day, get a free house, free dental, free health and make £40,000 a yer. What the **** am i doing working really hard 12 hours a day? I can't even afford to run my car! UK SUX! Can i come to USA?

Re:A little difference

[Kjella]

A home is a private place, a street is a public place. Shall I draw a diagram?

And if you have absolutely no privacy in public? Even if you walk past CCTV cameras, you are primarily observed, not tracked. In general, there is no record of you being there. I would certainly feel that a full record of my public movements would be an invasion of my privacy. Even big celebreties tend to get some privacy. Try these on for size, all "public" facts:

Who bought condoms last week.
Who slept where, either going away or coming over.
Who went to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Who went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 in cinema.
Who went to a mosque last week.

That's a lot of social, political, religious and other profiling for each and every citizen. In general, I place a big difference between being observed and being tracked, and what is being described here is a tracking system. Would you really like to have the government keep a huge file on everything and everyone? Move to DDR, ca. 1970 but don't bring that society here. We don't need nor want it.

Re:wow

[egoshin]

Which is why Im personally fine with the whole idea. Why track me? I go to college and do collegey type things, then on weekends I work in a shop doing shoppy things.

"Why track me?" - just to be sure that you do not visit a meeting with opposition or whatever. If you do - you would be jailed for 90 days to limit a damage for goverment party.

More exactly - just to find out who is an opposition LEADER before people start listening and vote. And jail him for 90 days.

Whose problem? This is just a power play.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Speeding is a problem

That is very debatable. The speed limits here in the UK are now so absurd in many places that the vast majority of motorists exceed the limit, yet no accidents ever result (literally; speed limits have been dropped on roads that haven't had even a minor injury accident in a decade).

This is just another power play by Blair's dictatorship and his ever more draconian Home Secretaries, right along with ID cards for everyone, the National Identity Register, electronic strip searching on the way onto the London Underground, the RIP Act, detention without trial for as long as they can get away with, installing CCTV everywhere (yes, we're still the most spied-upon nation in the world), reversing the burden of proof and/or attempting to do away with jury trials for increasing numbers of cases...

All of these things, of course, are "justified" by arguing that they increase national security, help to prevent crime, or otherwise benefit Joe Public. Unless he's in the wrong place at the wrong time, in which case he loses his benefits because some junior staffer in a government office mistyped one number out of 1,000 they entered that day into the master database. Or the ANPR system misreads a number plate, and sends him a fine for doing the physically impossible, which he then has to challenge in court after several weeks of concern, with no compensation for the time wasted or grief caused. Or his daughter's the one being rendered naked for the pervert watching the screens at the Underground station. Or he's late for the train, and since he ran through the screen he's obviously a terrorist so they shoot him dead. Or he's black, old, bald, young, or a registered member of an opposition political party, the biometric recognition doesn't work, and he's held for three months as a suspected terrorist on the whim of a senior politician, by which time he's lost his job, his home, and the trust of all his family and friends, not to mention the ability to challenge the statements of absolute fact issued by our political leaders (and I use the term loosely, since they didn't even win the popular vote in England, never mind an overall majority that might justify their absolute control of parliament, not that this particular abuse ever went before parliament) to justify all these Big Brother efforts.

I used to think the tin foil hat brigade were eccentrics. In recent years, looking at the direction New Labour have taken our government, I think the sooner we have a written constitution and a constitutional court above parliament and answerable only to the public, the better.

Re:Whose problem? This is just a power play.

[tomboy17]

Am I the only one who wishes the government in the U.S. would implement something like this?

Don't get me wrong, I speed all the time under the current system, just like everyone else. But the two times in my life I've been pulled over I felt it was unfair -- why? because I knew lots of people (just like me) had gotten away with far worse hundreds of times. If the rates really are unreasonable, there will be a demand to change them once they're universally enforced.

The traffic laws as they now exist are simply an excuse for police to pull over whoever they want to and harass them. Traffic laws are the most common contact citizens in the U.S. anyway have with the law, and the blatant unfairness in traffic laws leads to a general cynicism about the application of laws as a whole.

I for one welcome the day when all our cars have sensors on them and speed limits get automatically enforced. But, far more important, I would love it if sensors on the road could detect tailgating and send tickets for that. That would make me very happy.

Re:Whose problem? This is just a power play.

[nut]

New Zealand doesn't have a Constitution, it has a Treaty. I won't try to explain it, as someone else has done a much better job here. Basically NZ as a country has existed from this date - it may be the only colonial country where the aboriginal people did give their legal blessing to legal and political systems derived from Britain.

Mind some people didn't stop fighting for quite a few years after this date, and even today there are outstanding issues...

By and large, I'm proud to say, we have given to the hysteria of the Threat Of Terror less than many places, but we have at least one stain on our human rights record that derives from this.

Re:Whose problem? This is just a power play.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

What you say is true, but to be brutally honest, I have little sympathy if someone moves into a house next to a road and then complains about noise. That house was probably available significantly cheaper than others like it but away from roads, and it's not like it's hard to spot a road outside. Personally, I'd love to buy my own home, but since I can't afford one that I want, I have to accept renting for now. These are voluntary choices.

Having said that, where local conditions would be worsened through noise, for example because raising the speed limit is being proposed (not that there's any mechanism to actually do that any more anyway) or because new developments are likely to increase the volume of traffic or change its nature (e.g., more heavy trucks using the road) then adjusting a speed limit to compensate is fair enough.

Re:Whose problem? This is just a power play.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I do understand your argument, and on the face of it I agree that it has merit, too. The thing is, driving psychology is a funny thing, and history and research tell us that speed limits don't really work at all when set according to current policy, and can actually be counter-productive if set too low.

For example, you get roads with very low speed limits, which drivers routinely exceed by a large margin. If the limit is raised by 10mph to something more realistic, it's not unusual for the average speed to fall, because most drivers will prefer to stick to a limit they perceive as reasonable rather than break the law but only by a few mph. This isn't a hypothetical, unlike the claims made by those who say a motorway limit of 80mph would "obviously" mean everyone driving at 90mph when they do 80 now. This is based on measuring what actually happens when the change is made.

Similarly funny things happen with the currently faddish 20mph limits in the UK. If the road is genuinely only safe to travel at 20mph, the vast majority of drivers will reduce their speed to that level anyway, even without a 20mph limit. This is common on narrow back streets full of parked cars and such. OTOH, when major roads are shut down to 20mph for a mile or more, because there is a school somewhere within a half-mile radius, drivers will either ignore the speed limit when there aren't zillions of kids around at going home time, or drive so slowly that they actually lose focus and don't concentrate as much because it's too "easy" to hold their attention. The latter is far more dangerous, because an alert and aware driver travelling at 30mph is less of a hazard to children coming out of school than an inattentive driver doing 20mph.

This is why the whole "speed kills" argument is daft. Reducing speeds, or speed limits, does not automatically equate to lower casualty rates. If we really care about saving lives rather than Whitehall PR, we should be setting all speed limits at a level where they are a realistic balance between making progress and safe and considerate driving, and then enforcing those limits against those who are genuinely dangerous and inconsiderate.

Incidentally, my opposition to this is much more a principle thing than a desire to speed myself. I know my WRX could easily beat the chavs with large exhausts and LEDs off the lights, and I'm confident that as an experienced and well-trained driver (far more than just lessons to pass a test) I could handle my vehicle safely at much higher speeds than I'm ever likely to drive on a British road, so I have nothing to prove by speeding like a nutter around town. As you say, that is what we have track days for. ;-)

Re:What's a Gatso?

[name773]

this was too good to pass up searching for; thanks for the hint!

http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/art_217.html
http://www.speedcam.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index2.ht m

and a little news article on the topic
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,690 3,1037031,00.html

Re:I predict...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think we should all have access to all the CCTV cameras.

That would be grand. Unfortunately, they were all switched off for maintenance while the police held a few hundred people against their will on May Day the other year, right out in the open in London. Funny how that happened.

Re:Boy am I glad...

[takeya]

We are?
I've never seen a speed trap that wasn't a trooper running radar.

And I always speed 10-15 over (and keep a good eye out!), so I'd've been ticketed by now.

I really have to appreciate that the police presence doesn't deter me from speeding, but makes me a more conscious driver because I'm more prepared to break for them or other roadside dangers, and far more aware. I mean, you've gotta be when you're travelling an interstate US Route (not highway mind you) at 95 MPH ;p

Re:This isn't so bad

[mattwarden]

The thing is speeding is not actually the problem they need to solve, accidents are

In my mind, that is the least reason to stop speeding. The maximum speed on highways has a huge effect on gasoline consumption (and therefore its environmental effects) and (relatedly) energy prices. You can see this by looking at graphs of consumption before and after the speed limit in the US was raised from 55 to 65.

Thin end of the wedge

[Anonymous Coward]

To anyone suggesting such powers do not get abused I'd offer the old gentlement ejected from the Labour (the current UK government) conference for mumbling the word "nonsense" in Jack Straw's (Home Secretary) general direction when he was talking about Iraq. The chap was throw out very heavily handily and held by the police under prevention of terrorism laws. There may have been apologies afterwards but this happened. If recent legislation changes had been made he could have been detained for 90 days. Far fetched, yes, but this happened. Period.

To anyone suggesting we're innocent until proven guilty there was a news report last night of a chap fined for parking in a bus lane in a company van. No problem yet but he hasn't worked for the company for nine months, the company has written to Transport For London (TFL) to confirm this, and the culprit has owned up. Despite this TFL won't see sense and the guy will face bailiffs to recover the debt unless someone comes to their senses in the next week or so.

To anyone suggesting there's no erosion of liberty in the UK I'd offer the demonstration against the war in Iraq. Although this took place a senior minister tried to prevent this happening on the basis of not be able to secure public safety.

Liberty doesn't disappear overnight but one day at a time. And we've had several days already with the prospect of many more to come (id cards, etc.)

Re:It's not the speeding as such...

[Geeky]

I'd just like to add to this that the government seems hell bent on making driving expensive, but this is not out of any concern for the environment or as a backdoor ban on driving; they want us driving and paying through the nose for it.

Otherwise how do you explain new housing estates being built with no public transport links and no local shops - only a Tesco superstore five or ten miles away? Or how do you explain business parks built with no public transport access?

My company relocated from a town centre office block which was five minutes walk from a train station and had a bus stop right outside. We had been there for years and many employees had relocated to within walking distance. Our new office is on a business park, about 15 miles away, so walking is out of the question. The nearest train station is about a 40 minute walk away. Bus links are non existant. Previously I could walk to work in about half an hour. It now takes me the same to drive, but public transport would take almost three times as long (20 min walk to station, 20 minutes on train, 40 minutes to walk to office). Rather than walk five minutes to a sandwich shop at lunchtime, the nearest supermarket is a five mile round trip.

One other kicker; it costs more to sit on a cattle truck of a train than to sit in the comfort of my car.

The reason for our move? It was much cheaper. Not for the building, but for the taxes. In other words, the company got a massive tax break to relocate to a location that forced the employees to commute by car. Perhaps you could explain to me how the free market was involved in that?

I guess I still deserve everything I get though, for not being willing to take a massive pay cut to stay in the old town or spend tens of thousands to relocate (and incidentally, there is next to no housing near the new business park anyway).