Big Brother...

[Boomy]

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Published: 22 December 2005

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.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.

More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.

Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.

According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.

"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."

[Martin Keene]

I've read about this else where, and I suspect it has all got blown out of all proportion, I hope.

I don't know about anybody else but can you imagine the storage capacity required for this:

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

If they intend to keep all the information for two years...

It's a big assumption, but lets say each video clip is 1MB in size (you'd struggle to get it any smaller I'd wagger) so 35 million clips a day at 1MB each is 35,000GB a day for 2 years would be 25,550,000GB... Thats going to take a s**t load of hard drives!

Unless I'm missing something...

[adhawkins]

It says it will store the details, not the video. If they just store the reg number, date, time and location then the whole thing becomes a lot more manageable...

Andy

[Martin Keene]

If it is recorded by video, surely the simplest method of storing the details is to keep the vid...

[Boomy]

Police Camera Action edition number 947,567,836 should be a good one  

[adhawkins]

If it is recorded by video, surely the simplest method of storing the details is to keep the vid...

Simplest? Maybe? Most practical? As you've outlined, probably not...

Andy

[philsugrue]

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

i read the first line and though where's Christmas gone......is it April already......  

[jonlewis]

I sell and design the storage systems for ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition).....

While a video is taken, only a snapshot from the video is, retained of the number plate itself. The image sie is c. 67k

Currently, ANPR Data is actually transitory, not retained for a long time in its original format, however, that is about to change.

The big problem is not storing the data for 2 years, but managing the file systems involved. A single filesystem can hold around 250 million files at a very maximum before it will slow to a crawl, but having multiple file systems would be a nightmare as you can never tell how many files would be stored on any paticular day, therefore all of them would need to oversized.....

This issue has now gone away as we have a 1PB (Petabyte) capable storage system that does not need a file system. So, while I can honestly say that the initial post is not realistic for 2006, by 2008, it could be achieved.

[Martin Keene]

Which means judging by how good we are at setting up public service systems, means it might be running by 2018?

[GWatson]

I wonder if this will ever be used to monitor our average speed in the future?? F**kers!!!!    

[stu999]

I wonder if this will ever be used to monitor our average speed in the future?? F**kers!!!!    

IIRC that is being done right now (albeit on streches of road, rather than whole journey times)...

Mmm. Monitoring *every* journey is a little ambitious. At least by by cameras anyway. I know of quite a bit of countryside that is fairly empty camera wise, and I doubt they will be 'populated' by cameras in the next couple of years!

But, in conjunction with GPRS technology    

[perksy]

I know of quite a bit of countryside that is fairly empty camera wise, and I doubt they will be 'populated' by cameras in the next couple of years!

Hope Not Mate or that will b*******-up a few of the local club runs       

[Blatman]

I am left with an overwhelming feeling of...

So what? I am a law abiding citizen. The Police can video all my journeys from start to finish if they want. But they don't want. They are for targetting criminals. They just wouldn't have the manpower to do anything else. They barely have the manpower now. It's not like they're going to be checking every journey made on every road by every driver, is it...

[steve_m]

I am left with an overwhelming feeling of...

So what? I am a law abiding citizen. The Police can video all my journeys from start to finish if they want. But they don't want. They are for targetting criminals. They just wouldn't have the manpower to do anything else. They barely have the manpower now. It's not like they're going to be checking every journey made on every road by every driver, is it...

If you are innocent, why do you want your movements, and those of Mrs B, recorded and available to anybody who happens to have a credit card ?  Govt will be selling this info, firstly to insurance companies and then anybody else, as well as using it themselves for Inland Revenue, C&E etc.

You might find that you get a visit from plod because you happened to be driving a green car in a certain post code . . . not something to relish.

I don't believe this will have any effect on terrorism, the Govt come up with all these ideas simply because technology can do it without providing details of a real application, how the technology will achieve the aim.  Charging us for road use, speed measurement in some areas etc plus sale of the info is easy money, anything else is I think pie in the sky and will never be realised but will be used to justify the initial cost.

[andi]

ANPR is the bees knees as long as it stays used how its intended.

Anything that gets uninsured untaxed and unmoted motorists off the roads is a good thing.

You also saw its use in the case of Pc Sharon Beshenivsky, the car used was traced back very quickly, and now there's two suspects awaiting trial.