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The initial Trafficmaster system provided reasonable information about traffic jams from a network of sensors along the UK motorways. Presumably with an eye to future possible Road Pricing schemes, and anti-car theft/recovery tracking systems, the company somehow seems to have got permission to install a much more widespread and sophisticated Car Numberplate Tracking system, which has the potential for Mass Public Surveillance.
" Trafficmaster gathers its information from a nationwide infrastructure of *4264 infra-red cameras sited on over 7,500 miles of motorways and trunk roads, which are constantly transmitting information on traffic conditions to the company's National Traffic Data Centre in Milton Keynes. This information is then delivered to the end user through an increasing variety of delivery systems including screen, text, voice, and mobile telephones.
The company has developed its own unique system for monitoring the journey times of cars across the British motorway and trunk road network. The patented system, called Passive Target Flow Measurement (PTFM), will go live this summer (1998) and provide a constant flow of accurate journey times in a format that can be integrated into any on-board electronic system, for example, GPS navigation systems.
Specially developed infra-red cameras installed every four miles across 7,500 miles of roads, capture the electronic pattern of number plates of passing vehicles. The computer on the site convert this to a "tag" and every four minutes a transmission is made sending the "tags" and the time that each vehicle passed the site, to Trafficmaster's central computers in Milton Keynes . By matching the sightings of vehicle "tags" across the network, our computers quickly average journey times between every four mile link across the country.
The system operates 24 hours a day, and therefore builds up a detailed database of average journey times, enabling not only real time information to be provided to the motorist, but also a forecast of how any particular journey time is likely to develop over the next few hours."
N.B. there are now over 7000 PTFM cameras installed in the UK at the end of 1999
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The original design |
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The new style, marked with Trafficmaster . Is the armour against the weather, or against vandals ? |
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The infra-red camera pairs are from Active Imaging .The dual cameras and pair of aerials are mounted on distinctive "cobalt blue" painted poles.
This Trafficmaster PTFM system is not registered with the Data Protection Registrar as a "Data Purpose", presumably because they are claiming not to process personal data, although the definitions under the Data Protection Act 1998 do include data that could be easily cross referenced with some other system, which is obviously the case here.
There are conflicting reports as to how much of a number plate is "read" to be timestamped into a "tag" varying from 4 to 6 central digits. Can the system cope with the new "ABC 12 DE" type plates which came in to force in 2001 ? What about short "vanity plates" ?
Is there a one to one mapping between a number plate and the "tag" ? The company claims that the number plate cannot be converted back from the "tag", but they have not yet published what cryptographic algorithm if any is used to achieve this. Although some idea of the system of "tags" can be gleaned from their patent WO1998GB0000402: Methods and Systems of Monitoring Traffic Flow
Are these "tags" easily converted into real number plates simply by cross referencing with a few existing police Number Plate Recognition systems e.g. City of London, Channel ports, M25 variable speed limit zone etc or with visual observations ?
How secure is the central database in Milton Keynes ? Can these radio communications links be tapped centrally ? Can the Trafficmaster cameras be put into "engineering test mode" and be made to transmit full number plate details ?
What safeguards are there that the company will not divulge the movement patterns of its "tags" to the police etc ? Will it sell this information to commercial organisations ?
Do you think that this surveillance system, which will not just track the 100,000 or so Trafficmaster customers, but also the 25 million other road users in the UK needs more safeguards to protect the privacy of the ordinary motorist, and to safeguard the security of VIP, military, police and high value freight vehicles from enemies of the UK, terrorists, criminals and paparazzi journalists ?
This Association of British Drivers page has some more photos etc. of Trafficmaster cameras.Another other major use of CCTV Automatic Number Plate Recognition Plate Recognition, is for road pricing schemes (a market which Trafficmaster are obviously hoping to cash in on), such as the controversial London Congestion Charge scheme
This has unquantified health risks, especially if you live at a road junction where several such Millimetre Wave radio beams converge, and it could lead to a loss of privacy, by making it easier to use Passive Millimetre Wave imagers to "see under your clothes" or "see through walls" at longer ranges than would otherwise be possible relying on just natural background radio waves at this sort of frequency.
c.f. Spy Blog article Passive Millimetre Wave Radar Cameras - Floodlights on every Lamp Post ?
The Home Office report "Driving down crime" (170 page .pdf), published in November 2004, gives more details about Police ANPR pilot schemes, and also contains the worrying recommendation to create yet another massive national database.
There is a worrying and inadequate non-statutory, volunatry (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) Data Retention guidance by ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) under which innocent motorists ANPR data is retained for at least 2 years !
The Independent newspaper and others have reported, in December 2005, about the proposed National ANPR Database, due to start operation next to the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, next March 2006.
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email: [email protected] updated 26 December 2005