Traffic cameras used to harass and limit movement of peaceful protestors

Britain is full of license-plate cameras, cameras used to send you tickets if you're caught speeding, or driving in the bus-lane, or entering London's "congestion-charge zone" without paying the daily fee for driving in central London. And because of Chekhov's first law of narrative ("a gun on the mantelpiece in act one will go off by act three"), the police have decided to also use these cameras as a surveillance tool, to "catch terrorists" (and other bad guys). So any police officer can add any license number to the database of "people of interest" and every time that license plate passes a camera, the local police force will receive an urgent alert, and can pull over the car, detain the driver, and search the car and its passengers under the Terrorism Act.

And, of course, police officers are less than discriminating about who they add to this list. For example, "Catt, 50, and her 84-year-old father, John" were added to the list because a police officer noticed their van at three protest demonstrations. And now Catt and John get pulled over by the police and searched as terrorists.

Environmental activists tend to be pretty forgiving of license-plate cameras, because they're a critical piece of congestion-charge systems that charge people money for driving instead of using public transit. This kind of regressive tax (the £10 charge in London is a pittance and no disincentive to the wealthy, and is crippling to the marginal and the poor) is also much beloved by the law-and-economics crowd, who assume that rational consumers will all be equally disincentivized by a little friction in the system.

But congestion charges require license plate cameras, and license plate cameras are an enormous piece of artillery to hand to the world's police, who are increasingly pants-wettingly afraid of any sort of public protest -- including environmental protests. I support reducing driving as much as the next green, but environmental change will require lots of protest, and that protest will get exponentially harder with the growth of the traffic cameras that are absolutely integral to congestion charge schemes.

The two anti-war campaigners were not the only law-abiding protesters being monitored on the roads. Officers have been told they can place "markers" against the vehicles of anyone who attends demonstrations using the national ANPR data centre in Hendon, north London, which stores information on car journeys for up to five years.

Senior officers have been instructed to "fully and strategically exploit" the database, which allows police to mark vehicles with potentially useful inform-ation such as drink-driving convictions.

The use of the ANPR database to flag-up vehicles belonging to protesters has resulted in peaceful campaigners being repeatedly stopped and searched.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal Kent and Essex police deployed mobile ANPR "interceptor teams" on roads surrounding the protest against the Kingsnorth power station, in Kent, last year.

Activists repeatedly stopped and searched as police officers 'mark' cars (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: control, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Secret London's photo stream)

• [Milo]

  All right, now I wanna know –has the UK been secretly appointed as the world’s guinea pig? Because I’m having a harder and harder time imagining that even the most corrupt MP would want to live under this crap.

  • [octopod]

    the tv show big brother was pretty handy in acclimatising the population to the idea.

• [LyhjeHylje]

  This could be easily combated against by carrying laptop with “random register plate” screensaver.
  The database would flood with numbers and police would have to either ignore them all or go through every picture by hand.

  • [nic0mac]

    I find it hard to understand why there is so many calls for monkeywrenching in this forum. while a random register plate approach would be nonviolent the general public would remember it as the police were taken off the street to correct the problem caused by it and equate that with a danger to the public by way of lost police services.
    A lot of environmental groups found in the 90′s that they would lose a lot of their hard won support every time that a splinter group like the ELF pulled off a monkeywrench protest. Similarly its a big part of the change in PETA’s tactic change from the blood throwing over to the bared skin display style events, fear drives people away from your cause while a perceived mutual weakness will pull them to you.

• [Anonymous]

  If you want to throw a wrench into the ANPR system, use rental cars when going to
  protests. Imagine the bad pr generated when random tourists get pulled over for harassment by the cops.

  • [Anonymous]

    Clever thought. But I think these rental cars have special
    number plates and if today police cannot get the holder in realtime from the car rental it will not take long until they can.

• [Teller]

  Car-reducing methods supported by greens now turned on greens. This is tragicomic. Way to game it out.

• [Orky]

  I think the reason that the government gets away with those cameras more easily than Google gets away with StreetView is that Google makes StreetView available to us, which makes us more aware of its existence. To us, the government panopticon doesn’t really exist, because we don’t have access to it.

  Google’s StreetView is obviously much more benign: faces and numberplates are being obscured, and you get to see a static image instead of real-time footage.

• [dainel]

  Are the police in the UK so free they have nothing better to do? Most police forces usually complain of not having enough officers. Abusing the system in this way will degrade its effectiveness. If thousands of protesters are incorrectly tagged as terrorists, it will only clog up the system.

  A few months from now, these police officers themselves will go crazy chasing after the thousands of protester/terrorist. They might even be forced to let the real terrorist suspects pass by, due to not having enough resources to chase down every single tagged car.

  Surely the people who run this database do not want their database to be filled with garbage. Its much better to tag these protesters as protesters. This way, the police can hassle them on slow days, and leave them alone to concentrate on the real terrorist suspects on busy days.

  Anyone who designs the system will also want to record exactly who is adding each piece of data. If people are adding stuff anonymously, some will be tempted to put in garbage. Most people will also take more care to enter accurate info, when they know their name is attached.

• [rorschachian]

  There are reasons why I’m still proud to be a U.S. citizen, and this story exemplifies why.

  Even Antonin Scalia would frown upon citizens being blacklisted for searches due to lawful assembly. And he is the most conservative member of the Supreme Court, which in effect has the power to determine how our Constitution is used.

  The constitutional violations if this scenario played out in our country are so numerous it’s silly. For all of the power grabbing and truly scary things happening in the U.S., we’re doing light years better in the arena of personal freedom than Britain and many other countries (yes, including Canada).

  Now, if the U.S. could just understand the concept that economic democracy is as important as personal freedom (and indeed a prerequisite at many times) we’d be able to truly thumb our noses at the rest of the world. It’d also be good if we stopped attacking other countries and peoples for dubious reasons. But I digress.

  • [nic0mac]

    Rorshachian: some would disagree with you, look at what the USA has done with air travel and communications with the patriot act. Americans are monitored just as much as everybody else they just don’t know it yet!

    • [rorschachian]

      Oh, I freely admit the US has made serious backwards steps, but in the broad view we’re still doing okay.

      The air travel BS is regrettable, especially since it truly is security theater and nothing more, but it only applies to air travel which is not a constitutional guarantee nor is it essential to most people.

      The Patriot Act is far more troubling, but it has received a lot of public scrutiny and court scrutiny and has not been used to hassle the public at large. Protesters and political advocates have been targeted using it, but I guarantee a court would throw out any cases based on Patriot Act-gathered evidence against anyone. I also guarantee police will not be raiding every political activist as they travel in and out of major cities in the U.S. – the lawsuit settlements would bankrupt those cities.

      The last 20 to 30 years have been very damaging to US democracy and the rule of law (and the last 10 years particularly), but the framework to repair things is in place and I think things will work out for the best. Eventually.

• [RedShirt77]

  For all the British bravado about anarchy, these folks are smashing bloody few of these fucking cameras.

• [Dan Mac]

  This comment board has traffic cameras..just sayin..

  • [arkizzle / Moderator]

    Dan Mac, you ain’t paid your congestion charge.

  • [annthracks]

    as do they all :-) if you want to speak privately to anyone, do it face to face, and whisper!
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    end spook trap

• [Anonymous]

  Protesters should begin building a database of the public officials and police private vehicles and residences. I’m sure the collective intelligence of the internet would be happy to support such an activity and supply plenty of data tools and suggestions on how to leverage the data. Once collected the data could be distributed so it could not be deleted. Turn about is fair play. If the government deems it appropriate to collect such data it seems that citizens should join in to support the cause with their own efforts.

• [Flaminica]

  So the lesson here is don’t drive to demos? Or if you’re bloody-minded, get a lift to one from someone you don’t like.

• [Anonymous]

  Britain and America are two facist birds of a feather. Main criteria that allows this amount of government control is a docile and compliant populace(In the case of Britain its”yes my lord” and in the case of America its “God bless America”) Try that shit in France and see what happens.

• [Anonymous]

  @nic0mac >Anybody out there know of any studies that explain these differences in our attitudes from a cultural viewpoint?

  I believe the biggest difference is that in the U.S. people are “citizens” and in the U.K. they are “subjects”.

• [Anonymous]

  If you want the tinfoil hat version of why this is happening, it’s that the powers that be in Britain realize a global collapse is coming and are preparing for mass control and incarceration of their subjects in a total surveillance police state. There are no terrorists they’re worried about missing– the London bombings were plants “necessary” to step up and gain popular support for the next levels of repression. The people involved that morning had been hired thinking they were taking part in another of these conspicuously-ill-timed anti-terrorism exercises and had no idea they were carrying live bombs, which then killed them and dozens around them (just as NORAD was also doing scheduled anti-terrorism exercises on 9/11).

  Now that the computerized monitoring is in place, the next step is to begin tagging and controlling those who are more democratically engaged in the society. They will continue to intimidate them to practice for the time when this is routine. They aren’t preparing for that massive a system of traffic stops because, as the effects of peak oil and economic collapse occur, driving will become a luxury anyway. Eventually, most Brits will be relegated to controlled living zones and movement between those zones, except for officially condoned purposes, will be curtailed. Since few will be able to move affordably anyway, it will be easy to pick out those who do and find if they are doing so for “justifiable” purposes. That’s where the traffic cams come in.

  Okay, tinfoil hat off now… but go watch Brazil and Children of Men again with a different eye.

• [Anonymous]

  they don’t have “probable cause” restrictions on search and seizure in the UK?
  if not, why not?

• [Piers W]

  These two sites suggest ANPR is sold as stand alone tech.

  http://www.citysync.co.uk/go.php/en/sectors/homeland_security.html

  http://www.cctv-information.co.uk/i/An_Introduction_to_ANPR

• [anansi133]

  Legally speaking, I imagine that disabling one of these cameras is the rough equivalent of assaulting an officer.

  From a practical standpoint, there’s no way to keep all those cameras functioning if the public decides they’re in the way of legitimate political process.

  just sayin’….

  • [nic0mac]

    anansi133, Why would you assume that that monkeywrenching was needed to get rid of these cameras if the public didn’t agree to them? While the British government is considered a monarchy they do have elected officials in the house of commons. In point of fact some say that Brits are better represented in government since a member of the house of commons represents on average 94,000 citizens while here in US congressmen represent an average of over 700,000 constituents each and senators average a little over 3 million constituents each. Depending on how you do the math a British citizen has at least 6 times the power through their vote then an American does.
    Makes you think doesn’t it?

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      Depending on how you do the math a British citizen has at least 6 times the power through their vote then an American does.

      Although congress members can (and are) pressured to vote a certain way in the US, MPs can be (and are) forced to vote with their party on many issues in the UK. So, no.

      • [nic0mac]

        Antinous, The number of representatives in relationship to the population is what I was pointing out and the net effect is still the same over time as votes by the population do control which party is in control there in the UK as well as here in the states.
        I must confess that I’m not sure how the house of lords would play out in this equation.

• [Anonymous]

  Check out Internet Eyes, another British surveillance concoction. The difference here is that Internet Eyes uses internet users to contribute to the Panopticon.

  http://www.mepreport.com/2009/10/british-surveillance-game-is-prelude-to-orwellian-future/

• [misterfricative]

  Point taken. But please please please stop inappropriately invoking Chekhov’s ‘first law’, as you call it. It was painful enough the first time, but it’s starting to get really annoying.

• [Anonymous]

  C’mon Brits, use a little ingenuity. You wanna go to a protest? Rent a car. Use a friend’s car, especially if you know someone in govt. or another position of power. Throw some wrenches in the works. When they tag a car belonging to someone in power, fur will fly when they get harrassed. Collect some data on this harrassment to use in a lawsuit. I don’t know how the law in Britian works, but here in the US, discrimination lawsuits are levied when possible. Being pulled over and searched unreasonably time and again isn’t just about privacy, it’s discriminatory harrassment.

• [EH]

  Milo#4:
  I’m having a harder and harder time imagining that even the most corrupt MP would want to live under this crap.

  MPs (and former MPs) are exempt, silly.

• [teb]

  Here’s a list of reasons you can be on the database:

  Drugs
  Crime
  Disqualified
  Docs
  Drink Drive
  Sexual
  Other
  Protest
  VISOR (Violent and Sex Offender Register)
  NO STOP (For silent checks enter NO STOP)
  Intel

  For the whole database template see:

  Practice advice on the management and use of ANPR

• [Julian Bond]

  #52 France has its own madness as part of their game.

  What’s curious about all this security theatre is that the majority of people caught by the game are middle class, middle of the road, relatively normal people. So you have to think that the theatre is aimed at them. why?

  What’s distressing about these discussions is that they are invariably taken over by US fanatics who want to talk about the US.

  And what’s deeply ironic is that Brits travelling to the US think it’s a police state and can’t wait to get away.

• [lomlate]

  Regressive? I don’t know about London, but in my city only the rich can drive in to town. The rest use public transport.

  This is like putting a flat tax on gold jewellery ‘regressive’ because ‘poor people can ill afford the tax’. If poor people aren’t buying gold jewellery it’s irrelevant.

• [Anonymous]

  As much as the whole police state thing saddens me, the congestion-charge is IMHO a good thing. I certainly wold not call it regressive. Since its introduction, congestion is down, there are more buses and all traffic flows faster. In fact, I was for extending the zone around Chelsea and raising the daily charge. Given the plethora of different, affordable, public transport in London there is no reason one needs to drive unless you are a commercial entity or have more money than sense.

• [Anonymous]

  @#54

  I believe the reason this seems class based is because the majority of activists you hear suffering this abuse are middle class environmental activists. Animal rights activists are usually working class and have been subjected to this treatment for decades. But having been labelled by the media as loons thanks to a few bad eggs in the bunch, they rarely receive any media attention unless it’s to put them in a negative light.

• [Anonymous]

  I’m 23 and I’ve lived in the UK my whole life. I’ve seen all of these enhanced security measures spring up during my lifetime and in my experience it has made the country a worse place to stay. People are now naturally less trustful of each other and ultimately the governing bodies. I think that this is one of the main reasons why so many of my friends from university have decided to leave the country. These are people who have been educated to university level and have very bright prospects ahead of them, no matter what career they pursue. They are the future money makers and they are not going to be in the UK because the country is in a state of deterioration that is out of control.

• [Anonymous]

  I read a year or two back, in the Economist, I think, that the number of cameras per head of population is about the same in the UK and the US.

  The difference is that the majority of US ones are privately owned, the majority of UK ones are government-based.

  Not sure how I feel about that but I thought it was interesting.

• [shadowfirebird]

  Can anyone point me to evidence that the congestion charge cameras are actually being used this way? The guardian article just says “number plate recognition camera”.

  • [Piers W]

    London issues over five thousand fines for nonpayment of the congestion charge every day.

    Harry down the road in CarPoint Rental used to proudly display a pile five feet high. He was contesting every single one of them (something to do with whether a car was legally off the road or not).

    All of those fines need some sort of evidence to back them up, because they can all be contested in court by simply saying “No I wasn’t in London in my car, and there’s no proof I was”.

    So yes, I think they do use the cameras for their intended purpose.

    The ones that can track you round the country are sneaky average speed cameras.

    The congestion charge is great, but it should be graded down from 100 quid a day for Maseratis (except ones owned by the marginal and poor), Rollers and Chelsea tractors down to the current zero for motorbikes, electric and LPG vehicles. The ‘high end’ would be proud of paying it, especially if you gave them a platinum sticker to put on their car or something.

    Cyclists – a fiver. (Only kidding, I’m one of them, but more often a cheesed off pedestrian jumping out of the way of some tosser in spandex longjohns cycling through a red light)

    • [shadowfirebird]

      Yes, obviously the congestion charge cameras capture number plates; that’s what they are designed to do.

      But is there any evidence that they are being used as part of the ANPR system?

      • [Piers W]

        I misunderstood ‘this way’. I doubt the congestion charge cameras are, at least not all of them, because if ‘every time that license plate passes a camera, the local police force will receive an urgent alert’ they’d get a lot of urgent alerts.

• [Angstrom]

  the strange thing is, I felt Okay-ish about my government before they started treating us like this.

  not anymore.

• [Anonymous]

  You know what this reminds me of? The use of Arphids in Little Brother, tracking everyone, wherever they go. Hmmm…

• [Anonymous]

  This kind of regressive tax (the £10 charge in London is a pittance and no disincentive to the wealthy, and is crippling to the marginal and the poor) is also much beloved by the law-and-economics crowd, who assume that rational consumers will all be equally disincentivized by a little friction in the system.

  1. The basic ideas behind the law of demand (which I’m assuming the law-and-economics crowd subscribe to) assumes that demand for anything, including driving in cities, is impacted directly by income. Of course those who are wealthier are going to demand more of this service. The whole point is to reduce Demand, and it doesn’t take into account who is better off or worse off, the basic economics behind this kind of policy never does.

  2. A solution might be using some or all of the revenues from this service to subsidize public transportation. That would mean that many people might get to work at a lower cost than they could previously and could take away this problem of an unfair burden on the poor.

  3. Technically would call this a lump sum not regressive tax because there is no decrease in tax at higher levels of income to go distorting work behavior. Those who choose to pay for public transportation instead will not pay the full 10 and therefore are actually experiencing lower costs.

• [nic0mac]

  rorschachian,
  “I also guarantee police will not be raiding every political activist as they travel in and out of major cities in the U.S.”
  Do you not remember the G20 just 2 months ago? granted the police were not using cameras to find those protesters support buses but they did have descriptions of the buses as well as the tag #’s and you can see some of the results on you-tube. Remember whole debate over the protesters arrests over their twittering?

  • [rorschachian]

    I do remember the G20, and I remember the Democratic and Republican Party Conventions before that. Indeed, elements of a police state are used in the U.S., but with regards to speech and assembly this normally (i.e. almost always) happens in conjunction with major protest events. That happens aside from Patriot Act information or any grand national surveillance structure.

    In fact, it is just police doing their power-trip, “we hardly get to beat up people with *complete* impunity so let’s use the chance while we’ve got it” jackassery. How to deal with that problem is a good question, but I think the power balance at these major protest events is starting to level out some with citizen journalism and social networking, as you mentioned.

    However, protesters need far more protection than they receive at these events both from harassment during the protests and harassment prior to the protests (i.e. Republican convention protesters arrested with no charges prior to the protests). It is good to have National Lawyers Guild observers at the protests, and farm more of them should be trained. Also, every protester should have a camera, and many should have cameras that can wirelessly stream video information so it can’t be seized during illegal arrests. It would be nice to petition for a new division of the Justice Department charged with investigation of protesters’ and assembly rights violations by local police, but that’s a far off dream.

    Any other ideas are welcome, though we may be digressing from the original subject a bit. On the note of ideas, can anyone suggest what U.K. citizens can do to start rolling back their frightening surveillance state? Any legal strategies or grassroots organizing ideas? I think the U.K. can be saved, but it sounds like a lot of work needs to happen quickly.

    • [nic0mac]

      rorschachian, this surveillance at the G20 did not happen just when the event started it began on some of these groups early on before these groups left their homes to travel to Philly.
      What many people fail to realize is that in this day of disposable phones and wifi electronic surveillance is no longer targeted to an individual, all electronic communications are monitored then relevant materials are extracted and subjected to a legal litmus test to see if they can be used. information that fails to meet the legality test is then discarded. There is no other method available given the way the internet and cell network were designed.
      We here in the US are monitored just as much as anyone else in the world the only difference is that our government does not use that information as openly as others

• [Shithead]

  At some point when things like the “terrorist act” are passed the government has then become the terrorist. W did this, hopefully Obama does the right thing (if he can).

  • [nic0mac]

    W may have contributed to it but he didn’t start the trend and O may get to change things but will it be the ones we need? I’m worried that soon our first amendment rights will become so diluted that people will begin to wish that the 2nd amendment hadn’t been allowed to decay.

• [Anonymous]

  Like in “Little Brother”, it would be interesting if there was a way to game the system. I.e. falsely flag countless additional vehicles achieving two aims. They are tying up enforcement resources so that the ability to effectively use the system is comprimised and to generate a lot of negative feedback from all the falsely flagged vehicle owners.

• [Anonymous]

  Dainel is right.

  The next genuine terrorist will drive safely and carefully past cops in the process of harassing civilians.

  Security theatre protects nobody.

• [Anonymous]

  The UK is an Orwellian Police State, and it will get worse before it gets better. With the ability to track and spy on literally everyone, your shadow government can coerce, blackmail, or bribe who ever it needs to get its way.

  Everyone will potentially be a criminal, and if by some miracle, they’re not, charges can be manufactured in the “uncorruptable” database. Environmentalists, internet users, unpopular religions, the list will grow and grow. Eventually, you will all be a target.

  You traded your security for safety, and now you will have neither.

• [anwaya]

  As an ex-patriate British subject, this and the story of fascist internet regulation are very saddening.

  It’s time for pirate radio again.

• [Anonymous]

  If there are ever effective protesters, license plate cameras and any other vehicle tracking system allows them to be located and identified. Once identified they can be tracked, and each time they visit a gathering area any others nearby can be linked to them for more effective suppression of the protest movement.

  Identified protesters can be singled out for ‘special’ treatment. Anything from the removing their ability to be secure in their persons and possessions as these searches do, to unfavorable treatment by the tax man (it seems your forms are not in order) to violent reprisals if sufficiently powerful and ruthless folks are opposed. Lots of accident possibilities open up if you untraceably gain information about your opponents whereabouts.

  These systems couldn’t have been setup for abuse any better. Put the public in control of a tracking system than any politician or bureaucrat must submit to and see how quickly it’s all turned off…

• [mdh]

  Let us know if you need any advice on a model Constitution. (not that it will change anything)

  –The USA

  • [Anonymous]

    Hell, let’s just GIVE them our Constitution! It’s not like WE’RE using it or anything…

  • [annthracks]

    WTF would you lot know about a model constitution? LMAO You’ve had a real one for centuries and you still can’t get it right!

• [Anonymous]

  Eh, keeps the cops busy while the real terrorists go on with their work undetected.

• [Teller]

  Greens: Learn a lesson from this. DO NOT let the US government be convinced global warming is anthropogenic, regardless of what you know or think.

  For the ensuing carbon tax, because warming is “our” fault, our cars, air travel, etc will be monitored and we will pay by the mile. Fine, you say, it will reduce CO2 blah blah blah.

  Movement monitoring plus GPS will find itself in the hands of law enforcement. This is NOT WHAT YOU WANT. Take a bullet on this one – resist government laws “solving” anthropogenic global warming by OnStarring our lives.

  There has to be another solution.

• [Piers W]

  EH #22

  “MPs (and former MPs) are exempt, silly.”

  Citation? Do cameras magically pixellate them or what?

  Antinous #26

  “Although congress members can (and are) pressured to vote a certain way in the US, MPs can be (and are) forced to vote with their party on many issues in the UK. So, no.”

  You refer I guess to the fact that if an MP defies a three line whip they can be expelled from their party. There are plenty of examples of them doing so and getting away with it, however.

  RedShirt77 #51

  “For all the British bravado about anarchy, these folks are smashing bloody few of these fucking cameras.”

  What about Captain Gatso and his merry men?

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/sep/07/transport.ukcrime

  http://captaingatso.blogspot.com/

• [Daemon]

  Checkov’s law doesn’t apply. Not even a little. It’s a law about how to structure fiction.

  The actual law, in his own words (from wiki): “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

  Translation: “Don’t forshadow things and then leave them hanging”, “don’t add trivial details unless there’s a reason for them”, or “Don’t promise the readers something, and not fulfill the promise”

  Unless you believe you live in a work of fiction, this isn’t Checkov’s Law.

  It is, however, Murphy’s Law.

• [Anonymous]

  Right because “the poor”, being incredibly prone to cruise around London in private cars, reap no benefits from less congestion allowing buses to travel faster. While I’ve since moved North, I lived in London for 2 years with a car. While not poor, I’m hardly wealthy. I never paid a congestion charge because London mass transit work fairly well and, when I need to drive from the south to the north, the A202/A4202/a5 artery is free as is the A40 to head west. Central London doesn’t need cars. And while the CCTV system is ripe for abuse, it is that abuse that should be changed.

• [Anonymous]

  The licence plate cameras were put in to combat the IRA. It was thier existence which made the congestion charge easy to implement.

• [Anonymous]

  I dispute that the congestion charge is “regressive”. The poor don’t have cars, they don’t have the premium V6/V8 CO2-inefficient vehicles that pay the premium rate -and if they do have cars, they cant afford the cost of parking in westminster anyway. Vehicle pollution is worse in the poorer parts of the town -places under the M4 flyover, etc, and deaths of children by cars is worse in the poorer parts of britain, because those are the parts of the cities where the kids don’t have back gardens with trampolines, instead they go out the front door and get run over by the 4×4 driver on their mobile.

  What the C Charge does is mean that if your employers give you off street parking in the city, you still get to pay £10 for driving in, more if you have a fuel-inefficient toy. If you have a group-G card, you don’t even get a resident discount for living inside the zone, which penalises everyone who lives in the posh parts of Notting Hill

  If you walk in, cycle in, or use public transport, you don’t pay. And much of the C Charge cash goes back into TfL to keep those oystercards more affordable.

  That isn’t marginal, it’s a fundamental attempt to change behaviour.

  -SteveL

• [Anonymous]

  “This kind of regressive tax (the £10 charge in London is a pittance and no disincentive to the wealthy, and is crippling to the marginal and the poor)”

  If they’re “marginal and poor” wouldn’t it be pretty unlikely that they had a car in the first place? Given the price of gas in the UK it seems more likely they would be taking public transport anyway.

  • [Anonymous]

    “This kind of regressive tax (the £10 charge in London is a pittance and no disincentive to the wealthy, and is crippling to the marginal and the poor)”

    That is 100% true, while public transit is great this bill shows no tolerance for personal freedom. While the fees imposed will not even effect people with money, it will force the poorer citizens to take the public transit. This is more likely a bill lobbied by people with money to make driving easier for the rich and harder for the poor.

• [gcross81]

  @ teller #48:

  That comment is just damaging. Global warming is anthropogenic, no matter who is convinced. I think everyone should know, including our government. I also don’t think that they should keep track of our travel, and don’t see what one has to do with the other, necessarily. I oppose direct taxes on travel, and I really strongly oppose any government agency trying to keep data on all of our movements, but it is a slippery slope to assume that admitting global warming is anthropogenic will lead to those things.

  • [Teller]

    “it is a slippery slope to assume that admitting global warming is anthropogenic will lead to those things.”

    As you wish.

• [abstract_reg]

  When you want advice on one that does change things you can ask us. (Yay Charter of Rights and Freedoms!)
  - Canada

• [floraldeoderant]

  Realtime Orwellian censorship. The gov’t gets to stop the protests it doesn’t like, and let the others roll by. Awesome.

  Also, I too take exception to the Chekhov-invoking. I *think* I see what you’re getting at, but the connection is tenuous at best. (As far as general laws-of-existence are concerned, Murphy’s law covers it, as does “When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” or “The Met are lunatic paranoid bastards who need to grow a pair and accept protests as protests and not protests as potential-riots”).

• [nic0mac]

  This is a thought provoking article showing differences in British and American thoughts on privacy in public spaces.
  On the one side the British majority allow for the monitoring of public spaces with traffic cams and similar devices and will even allow some abuses like this in the name of public safety, but when google began their street view program they were very vocal in regards to their expectations of privacy even in public spaces.
  Here on this side of the ocean we have enacted laws in some areas that completely outlaw the governments use of traffic or public area cameras but are very open to the idea of any individual mounting a camera in a public area and broadcasting it over the net.
  Anybody out there know of any studies that explain these differences in our attitudes from a cultural viewpoint?

  • [pacelegal]

    We all reside partly in public places and our privacy interests deserve some protection in public places in addition to ‘private spaces’.

    I realise that England has become wedded to cameras, and the streets are saturated with them.

    However, the House of Lords in England has recognised that under certain circumstances there may exist a reasonable expectation of privacy when a person is in a public street. (Campbell v The Mirror Group Newspapers (2004) – where Naomi Campbell claimed a right of privacy from being filmed going into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting)This stands as authority for the proposition that under some circumstances a public figure can’t be photographed in a public street without being taken to task on privacy grounds. The judgement was close, 2/3 split amongst the judges as to whether the information could be said to be private. See also McKennitt v Ash 2008. The case of Mahmood v Galloway [2006] held that blogging was a public activity not a private one. (decision of the European Court of justice]

    See also Peck v UK, http://portal.nasstar.com/75/files/Peck-v-UK%20ECHR%2028%20Jan%2003.pdf, where footage was taken whilst Peck was in a public street. The European Court of Human Rights’ decision is significant in that it recognised Peck’s right to privacy had been infringed even though the behaviour occurred in a private speech but was unable to grant a remedy for other reasons.

    English law is being shaped by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights using breach of confidence to protect privacy in public spaces, at least in the case of celebrities. Although there isn’t a lot of case law on individuals who aren’t celebrities there are discussions and at least the law in the UK is recognising a right to privacy in public spaces. I suppose the difference in the US is that public figures are given less protection, but citizens may be protected by constitutional rights eg privacy type rights against unlawful search and seizure.

    The world is becoming increasing tuned into the expectation of privacy in public spaces, although with national security interests and powers being given to Government and intelligence agencies to investigate suspected terrorist activities seems to be growing, even under the Obama administration.

    Once these surveillance devices are in existence though and proliferate, it is the outward sign of a surrender of privacy, dignity and the emasculation of human identity.

    • [nic0mac]

      Thanks very much for that insightful post pacelegal, If I am understanding you correctly England is leaning more towards saying that while public surveillance is permissible citizens can still expect some degree of privacy in public areas. Does this expectation of some privacy stay in place at say public events held on private property or is it similar to here in the states where once it becomes public even on private property then the police can enter all “public” spaces legally?
      Julian bond, I’m sorry if we got of on the US tangent a bit much but for us to understand they differances between our cultures. I totally agree with you on #52.
      In regards to @#8, I think it would be interesting to do a comparison of the G20 meetings, London & Pittsburgh of this year along with Toronto in July in regards to what surveillance is done on the protest groups as well as any future ones France may host.