This should be the biggest story in the UK; you know the Government just explicitly took powers to give the congestion charge ANPR camera data to the Americans, or actually any other state outside the European Economic Area? And what does Boris Johnson plan to do about that?
I can’t help but think, however, that this is a great opportunity for the creative utilisation of this – via Schneier, why not get a personalised registration incorporating an SQL injection attack? You probably can’t do this in the UK, however crafty you are with where you put the bolts. (They don’t make a bolt shaped like the bottom half of a semicolon, after all.)
But a T-shirt with the following message:;INSERT INTO watchlist (pnrs) VALUES 'ADDINGTON/DMR';COMMIT TRANSACTION That would be cool. One of the nice things about QR codes, of course, is you can do these things graphically. Look into my eyes…
More seriously, this is one of the many things that worry me; the reason why I’m so keen on a carbon tax is that it’s an option that doesn’t involve creating a vast mass-surveillance system as collateral damage.
Wow. That’s just breathtaking. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that my government would ask for that level of data-dump, but that you guys would grant it. Holy mackerel.
Well, great. Another reason to resist the encroachment of cc cameras here. Blech. Thanks for drawing attention to it.
(Out of curiosity, what’s the British equivalent of the ACLU? What kind of NGO in your country would be likely to file suit over this?)
Either Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), who are doing good work resisting the daddy of this nonsense, the ID card scheme, or the more Doctorowian Open Rights Group.
The problem is the law, however; it’s riddled with exemptions for “national security” and such bollocks.