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England Starts Fingerprinting Drinkers
dptalia writes "In an effort to reduce alcohol related violence, England is rolling out mandatory fingerprinting of all pub patrons. If a pub owner refuses to comply with the new system, and fails to show 'considerable' reductions in alcohol-related crimes, they will lose their license. Supposedly the town that piloted this program had a 48% reduction in alcohol-related crime." From the article: "Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time - usually a period of months - by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offenses are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a 'psychological effect' on offenders."
Otherwise known as "Track Every Vehicle in Europe with the thin excuse of taxation".
Since the last time I looked at this, the UK Department for Transport documentation on the matter has become far more structured and comprehensive.
I've yet to find the mention that cropped up in the original, that the system had to be compatible with the proposed European system, but the number of documents has expanded considerably and I'm still looking. As has their estimate of costs, which has risen by an order of magnitude. And we all know how underpriced goverment IT project figures tend to be.
The justification that the DfT has always put forward for the scheme is the reduction of congestion in key areas. This does not stand up to examination.
The DfT themselves prices the "OBU" on board unit with GPS and cellular comms at between £100 and £525. In contrast, a simple active RFID in the front number plate would cost around £10. I suspect the road side infrastructure to read either solution is going to work out roughly equivalent in cost.
It's just not credible that the end goal of the scheme is congestion reduction. Congestion reduction only requires you to track vehicles entering the congested stretches of road. It does not require you to be able to track a vehicle parked in the middle of a field. When you can achieve your aims with an order of magnitude less in terms of capital cost, the only possible conclusions are that this is either pork-barrel spending on a massive scale, or that the government wants to track your vehicle wherever it goes, anywhere in Europe. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide WHY.