Big Brother is watching you – 40m times a day
POLICE number plate cameras take more than 40 million pictures of motorists every day.
Images of cars and their drivers are taken at the rate of 500 every second as they are fed into a computer that can track the movements of a car and link it to the registered owner.
The amount of pictures taken has doubled over the last five years. Police say that the system – Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras – is invaluable in preventing and solving serious crime and terror attacks.
Evidence from the cameras is often used in criminal trials and by police as part of their investigations into crimes. It can also be used to find car tax cheats and drivers with no insurance.
However, civil liberty campaigners warn the system is intrusive and there is little effective operational oversight of the cameras.
Latest figures from the Home Office reveal that the system last year logged a total of 15.6 billion reads from a network of around 8,000 cameras – many of them unmarked which are positioned on motorways and A and B roads.
Every time a vehicle passes, a camera takes a picture of the vehicle’s number plate and another of the front of the car to snap the face of the driver.
With around 35 million vehicles registered in the UK it means that every car is “captured” on the database on average about 10 times a week.
The network of cameras is operated by individual police forces and the Ministry of Defence but the records are stored on a national database used by detectives and intelligence services to track criminals. Details are stored on computers for 12 months even when there is no evidence of any wrongdoing. Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties group, said: “The secretive ANPR surveillance network indiscriminately captures millions of photos of innocent UK citizens a day. “Collecting and storing information on people’s movements without a clear legal basis, transparency and public consent allows for a level of intrusion which is completely disproportionate and unnecessary. “The monitoring of innocent motorists at enormous public cost is an example of the ever expanding surveillance state and must end.” Chief Constable Charlie Hall leads the National Police Chiefs’ Council for ANPR. He said: “ANPR is used daily by police forces and enables us to better protect the public from harm and reduce crime. However, this must be balanced against our responsibility to be as transparent as possible and protect individuals’ privacy.
“The capture, transfer, storage and access to ANPR data is managed by the police and other law enforcement agencies and remains closely governed through strict authorisation and accredited security measures. We continually review this process.
“We recognise concerns about proportionate retention of data and earlier this year, we agreed that the retention period should be reduced to 12 months. This came into effect in April.”