"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
Thought Police - 1984, George Orwell

Tag Archives: database

ANPR network records and watches your every move

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Posted by paul on May 24, 2009 – 9:36 pm
Filed under anpr, cctv, privacy
Tagged as , , , , ,

ANPR camera van

A recent edition of  BBC program “Who’s Watching You” has revealed that UK police forces, with the knowledge of the UK government, is building a national grid network of ANPR cameras.

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras automatically read the number plate of passing cars and check with DVLA databases whether the vehicle is correctly registered, taxed and insured.  Normally the cameras are used by police to stop offending drivers immediately.

However, the linkage of the police, council and other CCTV cameras into a nationwide network and central database means that authorities will now be able to track vehicles across cities and the whole country without anyone knowing.  The database will link together sitings of a particular vehicle into a timestamped journey around the country.  Since the system will automatically record all vehicles it will allow users of the database to retrospectively track any vehicle. Read More »

Satellite Tracking of School Buses

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Posted by paul on April 23, 2009 – 3:11 am
Filed under gps, surveillance
Tagged as , , , , ,

A recent BBC Wales News story tells how counties in North Wales are launching a scheme to provide GPS tracking of school buses and to make it available to parents.  So parent will now be able to track their precious child to and from school.  It’s all being rolled out in the name of reducing unruly behaviour on the buses.

The organisers Zoom say “…We don’t believe it is (spying on the children). We think it is a way of ensuring that the system works a lot better…”  They also say “…The system is actually very secure. There’s no information on the (ID) cards that the pupils will be given themselves. It’s all held on a database and it’s obviously governed by data protection.”

Well that’s OK then given the UK Government’s record on securing our personal data in Government databases.  As safe as houses!