I am happy they finally did this. I had my windscreen replaced a few months back and my tax-disk holder wouldn't stick back onto the new one. My tax disk holder has sat in my glove box ever since and nobody has take a blind bit of notice.
As always, if you have something to hide then you have something to worry about. I know if a copper pulls me over that nothing will come of it, because I've done nothing wrong. Sure, I'll lose some time, but that's it. If, however, making these stops can prevent crime in some cases then I'm fine for the stops to continue. Obviously if the police pull people over and arrest you for doing nothing then that's an issue. However, last time I checked, we're not at that stage by any stretch of the imagination.
The nothing to hide argument fails totally as touched on by Umbra in another thread, here. Not only are the points he/she raised valid, surveillance is by nature anti freedom of actions and speech. How many people say or act differently when they know they are being watched ? Not entirely related to the subject matter but i feel it draws enough similarity's to the mass surveillance of the public so common nowadays that i feel it's very relevant. http://torrentfreak.com/letter-copyright-monopoly-140921/ Just substitute copyright industry with NSA, GCHQ, FBI, or any of the other government bodies that proclaim that we must throw away vital civil liberties in the name of security.
It fails to meet the Fourth Amendment apparently. Last time I checked the UK wasn't the USA and we don't have a Fourth Amendment. You know what? If the police want to come and look at my paperwork and medicine cabinet they're welcome to, there's nothing of interest in there. Equally, the police would need a warrant to do so in the UK. We have a right to privacy, and ANPR isn't violating that. ANPR is not the same. You're driving a vehicle on a public road, in a public place. That vehicle is required by law to have tax, insurance and MOT. I couldn't give a flying kipper that there are automated cameras checking my car for these things, nor that it's linked to the police national database that's looking to see if my car is wanted in connection to anything else. Because that system is going to return a big fat zilch. Instead it's going to catch those who avoid insuring their cars, 'forget' to tax them and also spot vehicles that are wanted in connection to crime. Yes, the system may return false 'positives' now and then, which means innocent people get pulled over. So what? Nothing is perfect.
No we don't have the Fourth Amendment, we have an unwritten constitution built up over centuries. But the same civil liberties apply, as well as the International Human Rights bill. You say ANPR isn't violating our right to privacy but what else would you call a surveillance system that tracks vehicles and the journeys they and their owners make ?
ANPR doesn't track journeys, it tracks that a car passed by a certain point at a certain time. There is no way of knowing where the car started or is going, who is in the car or what they are doing. The amount of uninsured/taxed/no-MOT cars that it takes off the road is massive, this in turn has a big impact on other crime. You'd not be surprised that people who commit motoring offences are often wanted for or involved in other crime. I'm sure there are plenty of reports online of innocent people being stopped because of ANPR, but of course those stories ignore the fact that many millions of ANPR hits occur every day without incident. Don't worry they won't track those of us wearing tin foil hats
Maybe i should have been more specific and not used the term privacy as a catch all term for freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of religious worship. ANPR encroaches on the freedom of movement, and arguably the freedom of assembly and freedom of association. Much in the same way as DRIP encroaches on the freedom of speech. People under surveillance are never truly free. Yes it does. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/4758364/Police-will-keep-driving-records-for-five-years.html
Depends how you class a "journey". I start my journey when I get into my car and drive through my small town, there are no ANPR cameras anywhere near here so no tracking is occurring. I join a major road, say A11 in Norfolk, and pass by two ANPR cameras (random guess at number) my car is recorded as passing those cameras. I leave the A11 onto a B-Road and drive all the way to my destination, again no ANPR so no tracking. My journey has not been tracked, just my presence at specific fixed points at a certain time.
Can you be certain there's no ANPR camera in your area though ? The police have refused to make there locations public knowledge, so all we have to go on are things like this Google map made with public input, that and what Mr Whiteley, chairman of the ANPR steering committee said.
They are not all static any way, a bus stop near where I live was recently abused all day for a van with an ANPR camera in it.
And this is where you go off the deep end. Sorry, but you're sounding like a conspiracy nutcase...or a Daily Mail reader. OMG what happens if I have a paedophile living next door? What if...
Don't know what the fuss is about. Just tax your car. Just don't drive with 2 freshly smashed windows, the police will pull you over for that. OMG what happens if I have a paedophile living next door, Cei!?!? :O
And this is where instead of having a sensible discussion about civil liberties, about freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of religious worship, instead you choose to ridicule anyone that happens to think the state has encroached to far into our private lives. I expected a more reasoned discussion about how the UK is becoming a police state, what with them knowing the journeys people make, who they talking to, where they are when they use their mobile phone, what web sites they view, who they e-mail. At least some people are willing to speak out against the ever increasing powers of the state to monitor its citizens, to stand up for your civil liberties.
I live in a village with 15 houses and close to no through traffic I cannot be guaranteed that I will not pass a mobile unit, but again it will not capture my journey. The ANPR information isn't used to track every vehicle in existence 24/7, it's used to highlight vehicles that have information markers so that appropriate action can be taken... if you've not paid your tax/insurance/MOT you are likely to be stopped. Taking vehicles off the road that aren't paying for it or aren't road worthy is a win-win for everyone.
While it won't capture your whole journey, it will capture time, date and precise location. Put two or more of those together and you get a close approximation, stop at a petrol station, send or receive a text, make or take a call on your mobile phone, those are other times, dates and precise locations. And while CCTV/ANPR doesn't track every vehicle in existence 24/7 it's certainly heading that way, the number plate "reads" per day have gone up from storing 35 million in 2006 to storing around 100 million per day, from only storing the data for two year to storing it for five years.
It's pretty hard to have a reasonable, logical discussion about these kind of things when you're coming up with some absolute drivel that reads like a conspiracy theory. You're making wild assumptions about what ANPR cameras are used for, or indeed can do. You're jumping to the conclusion that ANPR camera A will read your numberplate, and when you pass through ANPR camera B another 10 miles down the road a magical database will record your journey, clearly stating that your car drove from A to B...and then to C, D E and finally F when you finished your journey. Lets be clear, most ANPR cameras are not linked to anything other than another ANPR camera to calculate average speed over roadworks. Standalone ANPRs in police cars etc. obviously can't be used in such a way either, because they move around and such a journey logging system requires static data points. You seem to be operating under the paranoid delusion that ANPR is basically a live tracking system of your car. It isn't. Yes, some ANPR cameras (the police ones) are linked to the police national database - but that doesn't record your journeys either. The ANPR camera in my local Tesco has no connection to anything other than Tesco's parking payment system. Ditto, the ones in a petrol station only capture the numberplates of people using the pumps, not cars driving past the station. I would say that if some policeman really really wanted to track your car through ANPR hits, they could possibly do so with a lot of effort. Even then its not like they know your exact journey, just that there are multiple hits in an area for a specific car. Just because you went through two (police controlled) ANPR cameras 10 miles apart doesn't mean you drove in a straight line between those two. The same goes for CCTV. The vast majority of CCTV is privately controlled, there is no national database of every CCTV camera that the big bad government can access at a whim. Exactly this.
