Mission Creep
The Home Office heads towards compulsory registration of all Britain's 72 million mobile phones, more than 40 million of which are pre-paid and untraceable. Registration requires a passport or ID. Phones then can be located to within a few yards using cell site analysis, which tracks mobile users as they move from one signalling area to the next. The system then links with the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system of traffic cameras, which provides live coverage of motorways and main roads. It, in turn, is linked to the DVLA which holds the records of all reigstered vehicles in the country. By monitoring a single telephone call it would be possible to identify exactly where it user was and the registration number of the car, which could be found in seconds by ANPR cameras tracked along its journey. In other words, real-time pefect surveillance. This occurs in parellel to plans for a communications database intercepting data on the web and extracting information to be routed into computers by by MI5 and GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre in Chelteham - last year GCHQ was given £1 billion but estimated to go to £12 billion even though noboldy knows what, really, they are up to. Eventually it will be tied to medical records and credit card usage no doubt and the UK biometric ID which may be required as early as next year. Of course all this information can go against the owner: in the wrong hands it becomes a threat. And the Home Office has an abysmal track-record of keeping the most simple records, which do have a propensity to go missing. Would you trust the government on this one? Would you?
- > CCT cameras in Britain: 4.2 million (source: Camera Watch UK and Transport for London)
-- > The average Briton has 3,254 piece of personal information stored about him per week (Office of the Information Commissioner)
--- > Requests from police and other public bodies for personal communications data such as phone and email records in 2007: 519,260 (source: CSP)
(Eyeball photo from Business Week)
