From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

The Independent - Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

I'm still having trouble believing it though, even after seeing it on the web sites of several different well-respected British newspapers. I mean, maybe someone hacked into all these different news sites and posted this story as a joke. Maybe the British Parliament recently passed a bill moving April Fool's Day to December. Maybe I'm not actually awake, and this is only a dream. Almost anything would make more sense than this being a real story. Surely... ?

[ 23 December 2005: Message edited by: Carter ]

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They call themselves libertarians; I think they're antisocial bastards
George Monbiot, Dec. 20, 2005

The road-rage lobby couldn't have been more wrong. Organisations such as the Association of British Drivers or Safe Speed - the boy racers' club masquerading as a road-safety campaign - have spent years claiming that speeding doesn't cause accidents. Safe Speed, with the help of some of the most convoluted arguments I've ever read, even seeks to prove that speed cameras "make our roads more dangerous". Other groups, such as Motorists Against Detection (officially known as Mad), have been toppling, burning and blowing up the hated cameras. These and about a thousand such campaigns maintain that speed limits, speed traps and the government's "war on the motorist" are shakedown operations whose sole purpose is to extract as much money as possible from the poor oppressed driver.

Well last week the Department for Transport published the results of the study it had commissioned into the efficacy of its speed cameras. It found that the number of drivers speeding down the roads where fixed cameras had been installed fell by 70%, and the number exceeding the speed limit by more than 15mph dropped by 91%. As a result, 42% fewer people were killed or seriously injured in those places than were killed or injured on the same stretches before the cameras were erected. The number of deaths fell by more than 100 a year. The people blowing up speed cameras have blood on their hands.

But this is not, or not really, an article about speed, or cameras, or even cars. It is about the rise of the antisocial bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless of the consequences. I believe that while there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road.

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Now granted, Monbiot does throw in one good point near the end, perhaps in a vain attempt to make the rest of this Ministry of Truth regurgitation more palatable. He states that "If there were not a massive hidden subsidy for private transport, those who decry the nannying bureaucrats couldn't afford to leave their drives." This is entirely correct. At least in North America (and presumably the same holds true for Europe), the automobile is so ubiquitous only because it's been artificially promoted and subsidized by governments for decades. The building of expressways; the use of eminent domain to seize and demolish entire neighborhoods to make way for those expressways; wars for oil; restrictive zoning forcing homes and stores out of walking distance of each other; the subsidization of urban sprawl by forcing taxpayers rather than developers to foot the bill for the roads and sewers leading to those shiny new cul-de-sacs. By these means and many more, governments virtually force people to choose the least healthy and most polluting form of transportation (and that's not even to mention the direct corporate welfare bailouts to parasites like Lee Iacocca).

So what does Monbiot suggest to remedy the situation? Eliminating (or even so much as reducing) these governmental pollution subsidies? Of course not. He wants to keep subsidizing cars, but somehow "balance" this out by having the government spend even more of the taxpayers' money erecting a mass surveillance system that could have made even Stalin blush. How on earth is this supposed to solve the problem? It's just creating a police state in an attempt to solve a problem that exists only because of the state. Are people really that gullible? Monbiot isn't. He knows exactly what he's doing, and he knew perfectly well when he wrote this column what his beloved surveillance system could and would be used for. And he supported it anyway, as a way of fighting the dreaded scourge of "individualism."

Monbiot is a menace. He's John Ashcroft in an open-collar shirt. He's David Blunkett in a subway car. And just as Blunkett denounced the airy fairy libertarians who didn't want the government imprisoning people indefinitely without charge, Monbiot denounces as "bastards" the "individualists" who think that maybe it's not such a great idea to let the government monitor and record Britons' every move, just in case the government should ever do anything with that information that we don't want it to. As the government has now proceeded to do, three fuckings days after this disgusting piece of drivel was published.

[ 23 December 2005: Message edited by: Carter ]

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Originally posted by jrootham:
It says nothing about the use of cameras to record car trips (a bad idea). It talks about the use of camers to detect speeding (a good idea).

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But of course, as long as this sophisticated fare evasion system is already in place... well, ya know, it would be irresponsible of us not to also put it to good use fighting terrorists/smugglers/dissidents.

To be clear, I object to the use of cameras to track all car trips. I suspect Monbiot does too. NOTHING in the cited article suggests otherwise.

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Originally posted by jrootham:
Well, there's this little thing called the rule of law. I realize that it is violated at times, and stretched frequently, but it hasn't disappeared completely.

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Imagine for a moment that the Canadian government wanted to institute a tracking policy like Britain's. They would have to announce that they were going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars installing cameras on every road in the country in order to compile a database recording and storing people's movements. Canadians wouldn't allow this to happen: It would be front page news for weeks, elections would be lost because of it, etc. The government simply doesn't have the political capital to institute such a scheme, and it's in fact so radical that it might endanger even a majority government. It just couldn't happen in the current political climate, or in any other in recent memory.

Now imagine what would happen if Canada already had a national network of speed cameras in place. Anne McLellan would be able to bury an announcement somewhere on page 12 of the papers that the mandate of the existing camera network was being slightly broadened, but of course this is nothing to be concerned about since the cameras are already there, it won't require any new hardware, and anyway if the fight against speeding is important enough to justify cameras then surely the fight against "Islamofascism" is as well? This would be far easier to ram through, as is now happening in Britain.

Of course, the left would officially register its shock and indignation that the noble purpose of the speed cameras was being perverted and used for things that no one could have foreseen (read, that every civil libertarian in the country undoubtedly did foresee, only to have their predictions fall on willfully deaf ears). But it would be to no avail. After all, as government logic goes, since we already do x, and it doesn't make sense to do x but not y, that means we have to start doing y as well (rather than stop doing x, which never seems to dawn on anyone as a possibility).

But the reason there are such a large and increasing number of x's in place is that different political factions (let's call them "left" and "right") keep handing the government more and more power in order for it to use that power against people they don't like. And this even though it's not only a strong possibility but a virtual certainty that these very same measures will be turned against people they do like once the other guys get into power (or even before). Yes, it's possible that the fools honestly don't realize this; but the knaves realize it full well and support these measures anyway. And Monbiot's no fool.

[ 23 December 2005: Message edited by: Carter ]

And I must say, I have been enjoying your rip-roaring posts, Carter. Your projections of what McLellan would do, given a similar opportunity, would be hilarious if they weren't so enragingly accurate.

Chief officers have revealed that, in future, mobile cameras linked to CCTV will be used to record not only the licence plate but the face of every motorist.
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The Telegraph (registration required):

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As the state takes more and more information from us - from where we drive to scans of our irises - we become commensurately weaker and more vulnerable. Scores of relatively junior and poorly paid clerical staff will henceforth have access to how all of us live our lives. What power over us this gives the computer operator; how intriguing it might be, at the end of a long boring shift, to check up, say, on the movements of an old girlfriend.

The Government will say the system will be secure and foolproof, but the recent history of public sector computer programs hardly inspires confidence. As the state grows ever more insistent in its demand to monitor us, and preach to us as to how we live our lives, there is much a law-abiding citizen might choose to hide, and a great deal more to fear.

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The Independent:

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Identity chips are being considered as part of a new road-pricing system based on a network of roadside radio receivers. Such electronic tags would, however, also allow a car's movements to be recorded without the need of number-plate cameras.

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[ 23 December 2005: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities

It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?

George Monbiot, Dec. 27, 2005

In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.

As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.

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As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.

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Originally posted by Clog-boy:
Only, if I'm not mistaken, they did it for another reason: In order to divide road-taxes more appropriately. Those who make lots of miles, will pay much, those who make little miles, you do the math. This way the biggest poluters will pay their share.

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Prescott satellite to spy on your home
[Deputy Prime Minister] John Prescott has told tax inspectors to use satellites to snoop on householders' attempts to improve their homes.

Images of new conservatories and garages taken from space will be used to hike up council taxes and other property levies, official guidance obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveals.

Mr Prescott's department is overseeing the creation of a database containing the details of every house in Britain to help tax inspectors to assess new charges.

Even minor improvements, invisible from the road, will be caught by "spy in the sky" technology that uses a mix of aerial and satellite images taken over time to spot changes.

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The Government is planning to compile a database of every home in Britain, which will include details of how many bedrooms each house has and what kind of roof it has.

Inspectors will look at whether garden sheds have been converted into offices or studios and whether kitchens or porches have been extended. They will even be able to see if a drive has been Tarmacked or a shrubbery extended. The computer system will be used to assess council tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax.

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Airstrip One really isn't what it was...the balance, as they say, between those robust old liberties and the anxious need to control is changed, changed utterly. New Labour is new. From fox-hunting to Blair's presidential, nay royal, style of government, to ASBOs (heard of those? A magistrate is empowered to order a person brought before him/her by neighbours for "anti-social behavior", meaning something you could call that but is not an offence, to do or not do pretty much whatever the magistrate thinks appropriate, sanction a fine (ultimately prison). "Anti-Social Behavior Orders". There've been hundreds in the last few years. Rule of law, not.)

Such a device measures speed, weight, and any number of signals and message can be received by either party. A vehicle is registered, and the right to drive is licensed so that the customs we enforce as law can be respected. If you're a terrorist it will be necessary to act accordingly if all registered vehicles had such a device. Simalarly a speeder would receive his fine in the mail. And to avoid these, follow a mundane life of respect and moderation or find another way to travel.