Slashdot Mirror
Britain to log all vehicle movement
dubbayu_d_40 writes "Using a network of cameras that can record license plates, Britain plans to build a database of vehicle movement for police and security services: rollout begins in March. Can't someone just swap/steal/disable the tracking device? Seems to me just another way to track the average citizen and not those wishing to avoid authorities."
I'd just like to point out that anybody wishing to drive dodgy vehicles around the Trafford Centre's car parks, should be more careful -because they have these cameras too. They look like tannoy horns, and are i think on most entrances to Manchester city centre!! -these things have been in place for a while now.
The ACLU has a less dramatic but just as powerful scenario in SWF form.
When a police woman was recently shot dead in Bradford, the gang who were responsible had bullied a man into hiring a car in his name. The man went to the police before the murder had been committed, but the police just filed his complaint and didn't link it to the murder until too late.
The car was tracked on the camera network (it already partly works), but as it had been hired in his name the police arrested him instead of hunting down the gang.
As this network becomes more widely known, this is going to become more common - gangs will bully and blackmail people with no criminal record into hiring cars, and may even, to prevent them going to the policeabduct or kill them.
And, of course, criminals will habitually carry several sets of false number plates, so that they can change the 'identity' of their vehicle several times in the course of a journey.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
The answer to this is of course to get a SUV and a can of spray-on mud! The SUV establishes the bona-fides that you actually were out in the mud off-road somewhere, and the mud just happens to coincidentially (ahem!) obscure your number plate.
Using OnStar's technology, neither the government nor OnStar's employees can:
1) Give you a traffic ticket.
2) Track your every move.
3) Run your plates every 5 seconds.
4) Use the above things to get a mistaken police report and hunt you down at any moment while you are on the street. (These things happen in nornal police work; I expect Britain's cameras to amplify this problem.)
5) Force you to participate in the system whether you like it or not.
6) Force you to pay for the system if you disagree with it. (IE-Taxes paying for cameras.)
People need to understand the difference between a business and a government. Businesses have no power over you; government does. Government can and will do all the above things with their own systems. OnStar provides a service, and if you don't like it then you don't pay for it and you don't participate in it. Try that with the government and they take away your driving rights and through you in jail. And of course if the government does start reglating OnStar, forcing them to provide the cops with an OnStar backdoor, you can always cancel the service.
So in summary:
OnStar / private business == Voluntary services
Government == Involuntary coersive force
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
The system is currently in use in certain areas of what people in the UK call "the city". It has been in place for several years after the IRA bomb attacks and other issues. They are now rolling out that number plate recognition system across many other areas. It does not require them to have any device on your car except that you have to have a number plate. However the system for number plate issuing in the UK is heavily floored. There are so many cars that are driving around uninsured, un taxed and without an MOT (road worthy certificate) that it will really only be an issue for the people that are law abiding as the people with out their car registered and on the road legally can still get away with whatever they want.
Moving forward they need to really start working hard at defeating the uninsured, untaxed cars from the roads. Its not that hard to do have several big crack downs. At the end of the day it will reduce the overall cost of motoring in the UK as there will be less risk of being hit by an uninsured/untaxed motorist which costs everyone more.
Some of the implications of the system they are implementing is that they will be able to calculate distances between cameras and KNOW if people are speeding, They will also be able to proove that particular cars/trucks/bikes are in certain areas at certain times. That in itself is a great benefit for tracing criminal activity.
In many places in the UK they already have the CCTV cameras in action and they do record the cars going along the roads. However they are just adding the ability to track the number plates.
The documents for the GPS system all claim that it's about reducing road congestion, but I do not find this justification to be credible.
Firstly, there are ways for charging tolls on congested roads that are far cheaper and easier to implement than putting a "Little Brother" in everyones car. A mandatory RFID unit in the number plate and a pickup loop in the road come to mine. And secondly, it's not credible that road pricing is any more effective at reducing congestion on roads that are the only viable option for a particular commute, in the light that the far more obvious negative motivator of the unpleasantness of driving in a traffic jam does not have a similar effect.
The disadvantage of this method is that it can only track you in areas with the infrastructure. Of course, this is not a disadvantage of your only goal (as stated) is to reduce congestion. On the other hand, it's a real downer if your real aim is to track the whereabouts of every vehicle in Britain, whether they be on the motorway or the moors. Since the alternative is so much cheaper to implement (by their own estimates, a GPS onboard unit would cost £100, without the labour to fit it, some £3 billion pounds to fit to the UK fleet of 30 million vehicles), one has to conclude that this is their aim.
Once you note the EU directives quoted in these documents that refer to an EU-wide standard for GPS road-tolling, it's not difficult to see that this is something that has had widespread approval for some time.
And you have to start wondering about the real reasons for Galileo. They can claim they want independance from the US, and the way the US has been acting, this is more credible now. But one of the features of Galileo is that it has been designed to operate far better than GPS in urban areas, which would seem ideal for the purpose of vehicular tracking. I can't help but make the association.
No, not reported crime. I refer to the British Crime Survey, which interviews tousands of people and ask whether they have been victims of crime in the last year. BCS is considered the best measure of actual crime in the UK. BCS figures rose every year till 1995, and have declined every year since.
I didn't refer to reported crime for exactly the reason you state. I'm way ahead of you.
I wrote about this yesterday.
Oh, did you also know this Government passed an identical law to Hitler's Enablement Act? This law enabled Hitler to assume absolute power after he burned down the Reichstag and blamed it on communists.
My Grandfather fought Hitler across two continents to protect Britain from this kind of totalitarianism. The least we can do is help the resistance campaigns at Privacy International and No2ID.
Another victim of the new tyranny, John Catt, was subjected to a stop-and-search by police, who recorded the purpose of the search as 'terrorism' and grounds for their intervention as 'carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info'. There you go, then: an anti-Blair slogan on your T-shirt is grounds for suspicion of terrorism, even if you're 80 years old.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Hmmmm. PC Sharon Beshenivsky was shot around the 18th November, and there was the story about the fab new CCTV system that tracked the car to London, but then the story all went cold.
Come the 25th of Nov there's a story about how they appear to have lost the car and are appealing to the public for info on it's whereabouts. But hang on, I hear you ask, there was all that news about how great the system was and they caught the purps? Hmmmm.
Now it's 13th Dec and the public are again asked to help find a suspect. But you had the car right? You told us your fancy new system followed it to London right?
How's this any different from just looking up the owner of the car and going and knocking on their door?
I submitted a story to Slashdot (that didn't get accepted) about this very thing. There was the story (referenced in the parent) about how great this new system was, but it had privacy issues, then it turns out all it has is privacy issues, because it didn't actually work in the first place.
Also funny how the Gov. were shouting from the rooftops about how this new APNR system was going to keep us safe in our beds, but nothing, zip, zilch, nada, to say Ooooops - actually we fumbled that one and we didn't catch them in the car in London after all!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk