Blogs > Liberty and Power > And You Thought Next Year Is 2006

Dec 22, 2005

And You Thought Next Year Is 2006




Think again. Next year is 1984. Today The Independent reports that from 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored. “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.” And don’t hold your breath that the Conservative party will oppose this measure designed for “public protection.”

As Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), explained, 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."

Of course. How silly of me to think otherwise.

Oh, and for more on MI5, check this out.


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Sudha Shenoy - 12/23/2005

Grah. had to happen, some time...Good picture of Karl, though!


Mark Brady - 12/23/2005

But that website is spoof.


Sudha Shenoy - 12/23/2005

From the MI5 PR website: "the public we most humbly serve"; "to keep Britain in its rightful place as the seventeenth most powerful nation"

Blech. That's the only comment possible.