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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."
Britan has long had the world's largest CCTV surveillance system. It has failed to prevent crime, though helped catch criminals. This will likely be the same way. My intuition is to say the costs, including to civil liberties, will outweigh the benefits, but considering that Britain is on the new front lines of Islamic Extremism, this may be worth it. Tracking associations is key in fighting organized crime, such as terrorism.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Like, how hard would it be for a "terrorist" to get fake licence plates and stick them on a car?
No sig today...
They also plan on using this setup to catch speeders. The time it takes to move between cameras can tell exactly how fast you're going.
In all seriousness, I am fine with having cameras tracking my car (assuming it was adopted in America). The only argument I'd give is that it's against our rights, but I have no personal attachment to the position of my car. In fact, I'd LOVE it a criminal stole my car and was brought down only a few miles away because these cameras were able to quickly identify the position of it. Also, I'd like to insert a cliche: I've got nothing to hide.
(scene of darkened interrogation room date is February 30, 2011)
authoritarian voice over loud speaker: 671476! on march 3, 2006 your vehicle was observed crossing the San Francisco Bay Bridge. There were 2 people in the vehicle. Who was the other person and where were you going?
subject: WTF? Whois 671476? My name is rodgster. I have no idea what the F@$& you're talking about. That was 5 years ago.
authoritarian voice over loud speaker: 671476, don't play games with us. Our records go back even further.
subject: come on! I don't remember what I had for lunch last week.
authoritarian voice over loud speaker: 671476, maybe you'd like to see the in-car surveillance? Would that refresh your memory?
-video clip plays-
subject: hey that's me and my girlfriend (in my bedroom)! That's it! I know my rights! I demand to be told what I am being held for! I demand to see my lawyer right now!
authoritarian voice over loud speaker: sit down! 671476, you have no rights anymore. Now, if you continue to be uncooperative we have some openings down in Gitmo.
Who will guard the guards?
An interesting quirk of UK law is that you can restest a copy of all CCTV footage of you.
Yes
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y /vrm_security.htm
from http://www.aatrust.com/index.asp?PageID=31&Year=2
Last year, in the 26 UK police forces that now record the crime, there were 14,176 confirmed thefts of number-plates. Up to one in 250 vehicles may be entering the London congestion charge zone on false number-plates and more than £14 million is lost annually by petrol stations from drive-offs, mostly involving cloned cars.
To counter this it looks like that the British government is looking at RFID tags in numberplates
from http://www.dvla.gov.uk/public/consult/vrm_securit
(i) Electronic tagging has the potential to provide the most reliable method of preventing the misrepresentation of a vehicle's identity through the display on its number plate of the registration mark of another vehicle ie "ringing" or "cloning."
slashnik
You seem to be assuming that the people who want to make a counterfeit plate are without resources. It's no harder to counterfeit a license plate then it is to counterfeit a CD, and look at how well the efforts to crack down on those have gone. At the most primitive, any color printer can make a fake license plate that will fool a simple (or even not so simple) optical recognition system. It probably wouldn't fool a human, but for many things that's not a big deal, especially if you don't need the ruse to last very long. If you need something that will last longer, it will require a bigger investment, but certainly not an investment that any crime syndacite or terrorist organization would have trouble acheiving.
And of course, don't forget that the simplest form of misdirection doesn't require counterfeiting plates at all. Just steal one from a similar make & model & swap it out someplace outside of the view of the cameras. If you attach the plate with Velcro, you can swap out the plate in probably 15 seconds.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is -exactly- like CD copy protection. It does little, if anything, to stop the purported targets (organized pirates, terrorists), but is very effective at it's real goal (forcing people to buy multiple copies of their favorite CD's, control the masses & collect revenue from speeders). Hopefully the scheme will backfire as badly for the British government as it has for Sony.
Criminals use the train/Bus network for their nefarious activities and have done for years.
The government have been building this database for several years now. Its illegal to own a car and not have it taxed even if its off the road. (it is free if you declare it off road). They now have a pretty much complete database of every vehicle in the UK. the owners details and insurance, tax status and the ability to read from the number plates.
Which is complete overkill to catch a few tax dodgers.
So donning my tin-foil hat...
This is actually about road-tolls. I think the government realised some time back that GPS tracking would never work. however set these bad boys up and down the major roads of Great Britain and you've instantly got a shiny new tax revenue system. I truly hope I'm wrong on this but I can't any other reason why the government would have spent what must have been a huge amount of cash to get this system to work.
Brin is far too optimistic here. Those with power are almost never willing to give it up or allow it to be reduced in any way. Quite the opposite in fact: they tend to want to increase their power.
Making records such as this publicly available will by default mean that the records about those in power will also be available. That will reduce their power over the public, which is something they will never allow. So either the records of those in power will be removed from what gets published to the public (thus negating Brin's entire point) or the set of records as a whole will be kept under wraps, accessible only to those in power. The latter is much simpler and, in general, grants greater power to those who have it, so that's what will happen.
And no, there's not a damned thing the "little people" can do about it. You can protest it all you want. It won't change a thing, because those in power know that they don't need to listen to the people anymore.
Face it: the entire world is rapidly decending into a totalitarian nightmare, and there won't be any way back out, because the overthrow of totalitarianism requires an outside influence. When the entire world is a police state, there is no outside influence.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
An interesting fact known to many bikers is that the current fine for not displaying a licence plate on a vehicle is only £20. Also, since it's a 'Construction and Use' offence and not a driving offence it doesn't add any penalty points to your driving licence. So if you're a biker going out for a blast take off the licence plate, stick it in your back pack, and "it fell off" should you get stopped by the police.
With the transit union strike going on in NYC right now, it seems more appropriate than ever to quote what a certain Canadian songwriter wrote almost 25 years ago:
Elsewhere he's said of the song that part of what he meant is that if problems aren't addressed, things are only going to get worse. Not that I know precisely what to do about this particular problem, other than writing angry letters to your government representatives, and going to the polls and expressing your opinion in that way.
I'd love to know what they are going to do about all the strange number plates that have wierd fonts or the numbers or letters distorted to look like something else; all to try and make the number plate look like some semblance of the name of the dickhead driver.
Plus for the terrorist angle; what are they going to do about foreign number plates, and cars from other EU countries.
It sounds to me like Blair and his gang are lying again, what a surprise.
No but, yeah but, no but...
And here in Alberta its not uncommon to see a vehicle (Honda Civics are particularly good for this) meticulously swept free of all snow and ice except for the licence plate and the area surrounding it. With people getting $2700 red-light camera tickets, this is hardly a surprise.
(Of course, the biggest advantage of a Honda Civic is how common they are and how useless the colour would be in "proving" it was you)
I am increasingly convinced that the sacrifices of his generation count for less and less in today's world. It has always amazed me how government behaviour such as this or the recent revelations about the NSA in the US not only fail to alarm citizens but are widely defended.
I was recently reminded during a conversation with a someone who grew up in Soviet Russia of the saying that the USSR didn't fall because the majority of the populace wanted freedeom - it fell because they didn't like standing in bread lines. I'm afraid the same thing might be true about the Nazis - that they are regarded as bad guys for committing genocide not for being a totalitarian regime, and that many people aren't bothered by totalitarin governments.
Tell me this:
If you were to pull into a parking lot of a mall and swap plates with a car of the same make/model (shouldn't be hard to find), how many days/weeks would it take your average person to notice that their plates have changed? Okay, so then someone has your plates, but create a chain of swapping plates on 5 cars and they'll never quite find it in time... giving you a few days to do your damage. Find someone on vacation, go into an underground garage of an apartment and find a covered car or car where someone looks like they've been in Florida all winter.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
When I was a 13, the state government installed cameras on the nearby interstate. One camera was near our land, so I shot it out with my rifle. They replaced the camera and I shot that one too.
Other people were doing the same thing, so the state scrapped the program (after lots of squawking about "public safety"). The point is, that an armed population serves to balance the power of the government. That's why it's a right worth fighting for.
Health insurance definitely is not a right, any more than having a house is a right. Yes, they make life better, but it's our own responsibility to make our lives better. Anything else is socialism, and socialism kills motivation, decreases the overall quality of life and kills the human spirit. See USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, China, Laos, Vietnam, etc. for some fine examples of that.
That's not to say that the health insurance circus we have in this country is any good however. If the government does anything, they should control the outrageous prices charged by health insurance companies and the obscene prices charged by hospitals and doctors. $18 for an aspirin? Someone needs killing for that.
But I digress. I agree with you on all your points except gun control. That's because if we have to fight for our rights, we need something to fight with. You're spot on with your statement about people trading their rights for "glass beads". Those glass beads are usually a sense of safety, security, and "doing it for the children". Unfortunately, the sheep who do this become less safe and secure, and the children are worse off because these minivan driving bufoons are lining up to hand our rights and freedom to some government power.
Maybe we can ship our spare rifles & shotguns to British children and let them take care of the problem.
There are several trivial ways for this system to be defeated.
I've seen several sprays and license plate covers that produce a glare when attempting to photograph. They can be applied to license plates to prevent speed trap cameras. They still allow the plate to be visible to the eye but cameras can't get a good picture. They are cheap and will become commonplace if such a widespread system is put in place. You could probably get the stuff at any gas station. I don't normally speed or run lights, but I'd get it if I knew I was going to be under the eye of such a system.
If lots and lots of people were being fined by such a system, I would suspect there would eventually be a bit of civil disboedience arise. Some people may start taking bb guns or wire cutters and dsiabling the cameras that exist on their way to work.
It could even turn into a sport like geocacheing. People who get tickets could go to a website and describe where they got a ticket and the approximate locaation of the camera. Next, someone will disable the camera.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
The gun isn't to protect you from someone attacking you on the street. It's to protect you from the government.