The surveillance state has failed. Big Brother Watch representatives have frequently been derided as kooky technophobes with an effete obsession with personal privacy when putting forward our critique of the surveillance state.
The lines deployed against us are so tired as to have become tedious. “If it saves one life or solves one crime“, people say, “it’ll all be worth it.“ “If you’ve got nothing to hide“, champions of CCTV claim, “you’ve got nothing to fear.“ If people had listened to our arguments more clearly they’d have noticed that our arguments about personal privacy, while important, have always been caged in the context of encouraging effective crime-fighting. As the London burned in the early hours of this morning, Alex Deane outlined the wasteful way in which the scare financial resources our Police forces possess have been allocated to CCTV systems. Automatic numberplate recognition: is it legal? Guest by Keith Mathieson A report in the Guardian last week reminds readers of the strong likelihood that local police forces have tracked their movements with the use of automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR).
According to the article, around 14.5 million numberplate reads (yes, 14.5 million!) Are generated every day in the United Kingdom. They are then stored on servers adjoining the police national computer in Hendon, north London. Each record of a car’s movements will be stored for two years – or five years if connected to a crime. ANPR helps police forces to tackle crime by enabling it, among other things, to track down uninsured and disqualified drivers and those whose cars may have been used for crime. Facial Recognition Software Takes One Glance at You and Brings Up Your Facebook Profile. Worried about privacy on the Internet?
It may be even worse than you thought — with rapidly improving face recognition technology, your automatically tagged Facebook pictures could help a stranger, or the authorities, quickly identify you on the street. A simple system that compares Facebook pictures and webcam snapshots can make a positive match after less than three seconds, according to Carnegie Mellon University researchers. Alessandro Acquisti and colleagues presented their findings at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas. "A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you," Acquisti told CNET's privacy blog. The system was able to correlate Facebook profile pictures to webcam shots, and to otherwise anonymous photos on a dating website. Camera grid to log number plates.
The BBC has learned a national network of cameras monitoring Britain's roads will be in place within months.
A national network of cameras and computers automatically logging car number plates will be in place within months, the BBC has learned. Thousands of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras are already operating on Britain's roads. Police forces across England, Wales and Scotland will soon be able to share the information on one central computer. Officers say it is a useful tool in fighting crime, but critics say the network is secretive and unregulated.
Kent's Chief Constable, Michael Fuller, commented: "We've seen an increase of some 40% of arrests since we've been using this technology. "I'm very confident that we're using it properly and responsibly, and that innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it. " A number of local councils are signing up their Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems to the ANPR network. Marked car 'Limited resources' Genocidal politics and the Somali famine. Droughts are common in the Somali peninsula, but only an exceptional one produces famine.
For instance, the Horn of Africa drought of 1984 did not produce famine in Somalia, while the Ethiopian population was devastated. The latter country suffered famine because the military government of the time was engaged in a civil war, and did not come to the rescue of its people. Ten years earlier, in the mid-1970s, there was a prolonged drought, known as "dabadeer" ["the long-tailed"], in several parts of Somalia.
Fortunately, this drought did not lead to mass starvation because the Somali government moved quickly to assist the people. They mobilised the population and sought the assistance of international allies to deliver food and water to the needy. Somalia's last major famine was in 1992 and was not caused by drought. Welcome to Royston … you're under surveillance. Royston has a medieval cave apparently used by the Knights Templar, a twice-weekly market and a football team that finished third in the Molten Spartan South Midlands Premier League.
But one thing it does not have is much of a crime problem. A small Hertfordshire town of just 15,000 people, close to where the county meets Cambridgeshire and Essex, it is home to chemicals company Johnson Matthey and luxury confectioners Hotel Chocolat. It is an overwhelmingly law-abiding community – there was a murder last year and a bank cash machine was ramraided, and there is the odd report of antisocial street behaviour, but there is little else to give residents a sleepless night. Yet in March a local newspaper revealed that Royston was about to become the first town in the country to have a sophisticated set of police cameras installed on every road in and out. ANPR has never been the subject of parliamentary legislation, oversight or debate.