Britain to Monitor Every Car Journey
Britain to Monitor Every Car Journey
December 23, 2005: In what is possibly 2005’s most absurd ‘world first’, the UK Government has announced that it will be monitoring all motor vehicle journeys. Not only will an estimated 35 million “numberplate reads” be harvested, the data must also be stored for a minimum of two years.
The national surveillance system will be made up of a network of CCTV cameras running 24 hours a day. It is claimed it will be capable of storing 35 million numberplates a day including GPS data and timestamps in a single North London-based database. The budget to get the system online has been set at £24 million (AUD$57 million) - just over twice what Elton John was offered this week to film his civil partnership ceremony.
There are also plans in place to increase the storage period to five years, link up thousands of extra cameras and beef up database detail entry to 100 million per day.
The data captured by the cameras will be cross-referenced with other cameras to determine any car, or associated vehicle on the systems movements anywhere in Britain.
The system, which is already largely in place with various networks of traffic cameras, speed cameras and general security cameras, is being pushed as a crime prevention and anti-terrorism tool.
Speaking to IDM today, Dr Roger Clarke, Visiting Professor, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the Australian National University says, “They've sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment. That will update some aging equipment, and catch older installations up to more recent norms. I'd have doubts that it would make much progress towards their asserted aims because Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) is expensive.
“So ... This as a kite-flying exercise and a softening-up media release, intended to make the public think that it's inevitable. The more support and the less opprobrium that it attracts will encourage them to keep going”, added Dr Clarke.
Dr Clark is an advocate, researcher and consultant of 30 years' standing in information technology strategy and policy, including data surveillance and privacy. He is also on the Board of the Australian Privacy Foundation, and the Advisory Board of Privacy International. His comments above are his personal opinion.
The nearest Australia comes to such a system of vehicle monitoring is the numberplate-reading Safety Cam system. Therefore any Australian system would require a massive overhaul. This was made more than apparent to IDM today when speaking to an RTA spokesman who told us that current systems “capture everything in real-time for monitory purposes only. But nothing is stored.”
Moving to a fully automatic number plate reading system (ANPD) in our region would be prohibitively expensive in terms of the following costs:
•: Initial image capture
•: Data transformation to files containing: numberplate, time, date and location
•: Data Storage
•: Information lifecycle management
•: Information retrieval
•: Systems networking for information sharing and collaboration
Do you think a system like this would be appropriate for Australia?
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