Do enjoy that feeling of the eye of Big Brother following you everywhere you go in city centres with his CCTV cameras?
Do you feel bereft when you climb into your car and drive away from his gaze?
Well fear not.
The Independent: Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Plus The Independent also examines Surveillance UK: why this revolution is only the start.
I wish I had more time to write but I have to go to work now. I’ll come back to this later. But for now V for Vendetta is becoming evermore prescient.
Tags: security, surveillance
