British Cops Creating Nationwide License-Plate Surveillance System

from the orwellian dept

Britain is working hard to maintain its place as a leading surveillance society. Building on the massive "success" of its widespread use of CCTV cameras, police are now installing a system that will use the cameras to track and log car journeys. CCTV cameras across the UK are being added to the system, which automatically recognizes and stores license plate numbers, then adds them, and the location in which they were spotted, to a central database. Police, of course, say the system's great at reducing and solving crime, and one police bigwig says that arrests are up 40% in his area since cops started using the system. But just because arrests have increased, it doesn't necessarily mean crime has been reduced. He further defends the system by saying "innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it" -- which all too often is used as an attempt to justify pretty nasty governmental intrusions on privacy and liberty. This system sounds like another part of Britain's attempt to record the lives of its subjects in databases, alongside its database of info on every child in the country, and details of all the internet and phone traffic there. Will people there get up in arms over all this government surveillance, or are they saving their ire only for the likes of Google Street View?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Special License Plates Let Certain California State Employees Avoid Tolls, Red Light Cameras

from the abusing-the-system dept

With all the fuss recently over red light cameras, Boing Boing points us to a fascinating story about how somewhere around one million Californians have special license plate that basically shield them from toll booth transponders and red light cameras. Basically, the system was originally designed for police, putting their license plate info in a special secret database to shield home addresses from criminals who might want to hurt them. That system is no longer needed because DMV records are all now private. But one of the unintended consequences of the system was that it became nearly impossible to send a remotely recorded ticket (such as via a toll booth reader or a red light camera) to the guilty party -- since you couldn't get their address. It even works in some cases when people are pulled over by police, because once the plate is looked up the record indicates that the plate is in this protected category, so officers often let the driver off for being "protected."

To make matters worse, California has made it quite easy for state employees of all different types to get their license plate on the list, and from the sound of it, at least a few folks are abusing the privilege. The article found some who owed tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid fines for abusing toll lanes. It seems clear that many state employees are aware of these "benefits." The article notes that museum security guards actually made sure to include a clause in a recent labor agreement that would allow them to get these secret plates. At this point, it would appear there's simply no reason to keep these secret license plates in existence, but they're still there basically just to be used by folks who want to disobey traffic laws and get away with it for free, no matter how often they're caught.

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