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Australia Mulling a Nationwide Vehicle-Tracking System
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that as political support for Australia's version of the national ID card is waning, the powers that be have found a far more effective way to catalog the populace. CrimTrac, an Australian government agency responsible for designing technical solutions to aid policing, is due to hand in a $2.2 million scoping study for the introduction of a nationwide automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR). It seems that as well as ANPR, the system will also collect images of drivers and passengers with high enough resolution for identification purposes. All ANPR data collected would be made available to participating agencies in real time, and retained for five years for future investigations."
No, crime will stop when the second to last person dies.
Yeh but thats counting all of the private entity Cameras. There seems to be a widespread myth these days that every camera you see everywhere is linked together. So that perhaps a mean with a white beard and an over exuberant use of visa vis can watch us 24/7.
A fraction of the cameras are owned and controlled by the government and even then, from the limited information ive obtained from watching crime programs, getting detailed information accross even county borders isnt easy.
Take off the tinfoil hat please.
I know you were kind of joking, but I think that would be a great test for any new law like this. Something to go in the constitution. Any politician voting to approve any new monitoring law has to make all data collected about them (and their family?) publicly available in as near to real time as possible for the duration of their term of office, and a few years afterward, just to make sure.
If the law gets in, the monitoring is only put in on a trial basis for (say) 6 months, after which the politicians are given the opportunity to change their mind about their vote (eg the law is put to vote again).
If any politician doesn't want to vote for such a law on that basis, then that's probably a pretty good indicator that the law is too intrusive.
Of course, surveillance *can* be used by a police state, but it can be used against the state as well.
Not if the police state makes it unlawful for anyone but themselves to use surveillance. In the UK, you'll more than likely have your camera taken off you if the police spot you filming them.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons