UK: The State Of Surveillance. Tracking You.
by Xen, Originally published in 2600 magazine in Spring 2006 , posted here with the kind permission of the author.
As of Autumn 2005 an ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) system has been rolled out across the United Kingdom, at each of the 43 forces in England and Wales and in some forces across Scotland. This nationwide system is run centrally from London and is expected to process as many as 50 million number plates a day by the end of 2006. During processing of these number plates the information of where and when they where seen will be logged and kept on file for at least 2 years.
ANPR is a method of using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology on video or static images to automatically detect and read the number plate of any vehicle(s) it can see. In the case of the UK police the system it reads from live video feeds and as of Autumn 2005 the system has been reading from CCTV cameras nationwide, but years before this the police had already implemented a mobile ANPR system, the ANPR system would take video from a camera either in a police car or in a specially modified van, this technology was not installed on motorcycles, instead the motorcycles form part of an 'intercept team'.
The vans which are still in use today are highly visible, some might even say 'ANPR' on the back, the back of the vehicle is the bit that they will point towards the traffic, this is done because the top panels above the windows on the two back doors hinge upwards revealing two CCTV cameras. It would appear that each camera can monitor two lanes each, so this van is normally used on motorways. With these vans there is normally a large presence of other police vehicles in the area, motorcycles are most commonly used, these vehicles will receive a radio call from the ANPR operator (who's in the van) when he/she gets a 'hit' and they will intercept the appropriate vehicle.
The ANPR system in police cars use a camera that is built into the car, there is no way of identifying if the system is in use, it is designed to be passive and work during normal operation of the car. Some older cars use laptops and portable cameras, you will normally find these cars parked up at the side of the road.
The ANPR system in what ever form will do the same task, it will 'read' the number plates of vehicles it sees, it will then check this number against the police national computer (PNC), localised intelligence databases (and the databases of all the other forces) and the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) databases, to check for untaxed cars, uninsured cars, to see if the car has been stolen and to check if the owner of the car is wanted.
There is also a certain amount of low level data mining going on because the system can also alert the police of 'cloned' plates, where the same number plates are being used on the different cars. It does this by checking the system for the last few instances of the car being seen, obviously if the system sees the car and the car number plates where last registered on the database as being 600 miles away an hour ago then there has either been some serious speeding on the motorists part or the plates have been cloned.
The police when 'talking up' this system will give examples of pulling over know drug offenders/dealers and finding large amounts of drugs on them, this tells us that the system is somehow connected to the criminal records system, they will probably put the information of know criminals in their local intelligence database, so that when their car's appear on the system they can go fishing and hope they catch something.
One thing that we can learn from an interview of Chief Constable Meredydd Hughes in The Sunday Times[1] is that when they trialled this system on the M42, they used cameras every 400 yards, if they where only using these cameras for ANPR, this would be overkill, they would be checking the number plates against the database every 400 yards, they are obviously using this system as a new speed camera.
But that was just a trail on one motorway, what about the rest of the motorway do they all have ANPR cameras every 400 yards? The national ANPR coordinator, John Dean, has said that every motorway in the country has this ANPR cameras at what he called 'strategic points'.
Something that they also like to boast about is there link to petrol stations and supermarkets, they are linking those cameras in some area's to their system, using their CCTV footage to track people when they fill-up or do the shopping.
Some companies like Genesis UK[2] are offering ANPR systems for petrol stations and claiming them to be 'The only systems in the UK linked to Police Databases'.
So that's ANPR, but they want more! There have also but calls for 'Pay-as-you-go' road charging schemes nationwide by Alistair Darling the Transport Secretary, by which he means to sneak in a system of 'total awareness' in the form of GPS trackers in every car in the country, he wants trails of this in 5 years.
Most worryingly some car insurance companies here are using this system already to work out how much insurance to charge you based on how much, how far and where you drive! They are now treating cars like mobile phones with 'off-peak' driving. With 'the first 100 off-peak miles free per month'. This system appears to use the mobile phone network to transmit it's data back to the companies involved.
Want to hear more reasons to dump your car? How about 'E-Plates'[3]? RFID tags in your number plates, if the Government trails go well every number plate will contain an rfid tag containing a 'unique encrypted identification number' that can be read at speeds of up to 200mph at a distance of 100 meters away at a rate of 200 cars a second, where as ANPR is unable to read number plates at speed greater than 100mph. This system will consist of both fixed location receivers and mobile units, it will be used to stop 'car cloning' in the same way ANPR system works. 'E-plates' is just one company/system that is hoping to be picked for the forthcoming Government trails of rfid based number plates, but which ever company wins it's the same result for us. They are going to trail this system first on police cars, it's quite obvious a certain amount of stupidity has gone into this plan, i can imagine now a product for your car that will 'detect police cars from 100 meters away'.
So now you have stopped using your car for fear of being falsely arrested at every turn, you will probably want to start walking every where right? at least for short journey's. Well if i was you i would take a hat and false moustache because the next hottest 'civil-liberty-killing' toy is facial recognition!
Some police forces (like West Yorkshire police) have been using AFR (Automatic Facial Recognition) to compare images taken from CCTV cameras where a crime has taken place against database of tens of thousands of mugshots, using a system developed by Aurora computer services ltd[4].
In 2005 at the Weston Park, Staffordshire for the 'V Festival', the Staffordshire Police having gotten bored with just using the same-old ANPR and 'palm-wipe drug testing' kits on it's attendees decided to go the whole nine yards and scan their faces as well, looking for 'trouble makers' of course, the database which was 'linked to an intelligence database of known offenders' photos' returned facial matches to officers[5].
With ID cards on the way, we will probably have our face 'mapped' as another way to identify us, won't they just love that, a full database of everyone in the country to search against when a crime takes place.
"It is also likely that that facial recognition technology will develop to the point where an individual captured on a CCTV camera could potentially be identified from the National Identity Register. Again, we doubt whether the pressure to use the system in this way could be resisted forever by future governments.". Those are the words of a house of commons Home Affairs report from July 2004[6].
So in years to come if you happen to have a uncanny likeness of someone who's just been on 'crime watch', expect a knock at the door.
Meanwhile in Birmingham and Newham they have for some time now hooked their town centre CCTV systems up to a piece of software called FaceIt[7], FaceIt automatically captures faces viewed by the CCTV cameras and compares them with a big database.
There are obviously questions about the accuracy of these types of systems and the founder of Aurora laid them to rest telling the BBC: "We can't say it's 100% but we've done tests and have a zero failure rate"[8], that clears that up then.
There are, of course, many more ways they can track you these days, as we know from the aftermath of the London July 7th bombings, they can and will use mobile phones to track people.
Something i have not seen yet is remote iris recognition, they have even developed a system to identify people by the way they walk (see Automatic Gait Recognition), but not one to read your iris from a distance. Surely it won't be too long now.
Of course none of these system work 100% and for those of us who wish not to be tracked there will always be flaws with these systems. Don't want to be tracked by ANPR? Don't use a car, Don't want your face recognised? Wear a hat and don't look up at cameras, Don't want your phone tracked? Don't use one, don't register your details or leave it off until you need to use it. Don't want your iris read? Replace your eyes... or just use Atropine eye drops which will dilate your pupils for a couple of days, Tom Cruises' character in 'Minority Report' could have saved himself allot of pain this way.
But what if you have a skin disease that has faded away your finger prints? or a cataract? or lost your hands in an accident? or a million other things that effect parts of your body that are used in biometric identification, will you in the future be able to do anything in this country? These systems will breed more discrimination and alienate the minority groups even more. These systems are wrong on every level and any advantages the government can come up with, or any elaborate '1 in a billion chance' scenario for these systems saving us from a nuclear attack is just not worth the invasion of privacy and destruction of civil rights.
[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1869818,00.html
[2] http://www.guk.co.uk
[3] http://www.e-plate.com
[4] http://www.auroraserv.co.uk
[5] http://www.efestivals.co.uk/news/050807a.shtml
[6] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/13007.htm
[7] http://www.identix.com
[8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4035285.stm
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