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Surveillance role for traffic cameras

01 January 2003

From 17 February 2003, 200,000 motorists in London have had to pay a £5 "congestion charge" to enter central London. 688 CCTV cameras have been installed to enforce the charge around the edge of the zone and automatically issue non-paying motorists with an £80 fine by checking vehicle number plates against payments and driver licensing and car registration databases. However, just eight days before the congestion charge came into effect, it emerged that MI5, Special Branch and the Metropolitan police had been secretly involved in the development of the system since 11 September, introducing facial recognition technology to conduct surveillance and search for suspects.
Surveillance of the central London congestion charge zone extends the reach of the so-called "ring of steel", where the number plates of all vehicles entering the financial district in the City of London are checked against police and intelligence databases. The face recognition schemes that will be employed are already being used in the east London borough of Newham, and in Birmingham, and tested by four other local authorities.
The Home Office, meanwhile, is developing a new generation of road surveillance cameras, which can either be linked to existing CCTV road monitoring systems or used by mobile units in police patrol vehicles. Nine UK police forces are testing the system, which can scan up to 3,000 number plates an hour and cover three lanes of motorway traffic. The cameras are linked directly to the Police National Computer and other databases. Details of any vehicles of interest to the police are immediately passed to dedicated intercept teams who stop the driver.
Guardian 27.1.03; Observer 9.2.02