Big brother -style surveillance growing on Britain’s roads

India Times
Jan. 31, 2006

LONDON: Big Brother-style surveillance is growing on Britain’s roads, where police will have the greatest ability in the world to scrutinise, control and record the movements of drivers by the end of the year.

Thousands of cameras reading vehicle number plates and comparing data with a central data base will analyse some 35 mn pieces of information per day.

The data will be transmitted to the police and also MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, to help in the hunt for suspected criminals or terrorists.

It will be kept for two years, but the period may be ex-tended to five years. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s centre-left government has invested some $ 27 mn dollars (15 mn pounds) in the project this year.

“The plan is to deny criminals the use of the road,” said retired police officer John Dean, who is co-ordinating the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) programme. “We will combine our efforts in a national net-work which, we hope, will be active from May,” Dean said.