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The UK already has very serious ANPR coverage. I haven't been on a motorway without it in the last few years —many A roads too— but it goes much deeper than tha

The UK already has very serious ANPR coverage. I haven't been on a motorway without it in the last few years —many A roads too— but it goes much deeper than that. I'm in the middle of nowhere and a dinky little B-road near me has a 4×2 grid of ANPR cameras monitoring traffic on both directions. Most interestingly are the justifications for these things. Widespread ANPR means it's easy to find people who are driving their cars without MOT, VED and insurance. People without those are liabilities to us all, so we don't want them on the road, right? It's just a happy coincidence that the security services also get to monitor more and more movement in the country. I wish they'd fund health and social care with as much enthusiasm.

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
Every petrol (gas) station has ANPR; which makes sense, you can't get too far before you have to fill up.
- bloak 8y ago
  If you're on the run, you've probably changed your number plate. If you're just an opposition politician being monitored, then where you buy petrol probably doesn't reveal very much about your activities. And you're probably using a card to pay for the petrol anyway.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - josephg 8y ago
    Sure; but it raises the bar for criminals. Ie, it makes being an effective criminal require more knowledge and more work. And that makes a huge difference in practice. How many criminals actually have good enough opsec to change the license plates on their car? I bet it’s well under 20%. And I know that an 80% solution kills me as an engineer, but I bet law enforcement sees an 80% solution as a massive win. Us technologists should know how much this stuff matters from the huge effect good design has on product adoption. (Or dark patterns on user behaviour). This is the same effect in action - changing defaults changes the behaviour of the majority. Another example: People say that “if you make guns illegal only criminals will have guns”. Yet here in Australia very few crimes are committed using firearms. This is the same effect in action. (I’m not arguing for gun control - just that these laws have an effect) And with that in mind, I think the reason why we’re finally seeing a big push from the 5 eyes is because finally, finally one of the big chat platforms (WhatsApp) has rolled out end to end encryption. That lowered the bar far enough that privacy from the government is becoming the default. One implication of this way of thinking is that it changes where the battle lines are. To win, the government doesn’t need to make end to end encryption impossible. They just need to make end to end encryption a bit difficult and non-obvious. Doing that will probably push the % of criminals who use proper encryption back into single digit percentages. After all, if you can research and understand the implications of application and messaging security, you can probably make a better living working at an IT desk somewhere than you can from stealing cars. Law enforcement would probably see that as a huge win, even if all us techies can keep sideloading Signal or whatever. Personally I don’t consider that good enough - I want a society where everyone has privacy. Not just those who have opted in to it.
    - bloak 8y ago
      I think a lot of petty criminals are driving vehicles which are not correctly registered. (I've heard about cases in which a cyclist has been hit by a white van, gone to the police with the van's number plate and been told: Oh, they don't seem to have registered themselves properly. Since no one's been killed we can't be bothered to investigate any further.) So a lot of this computer-based, large-scale surveillance is more effective against law-abiding political activists than it is against ordinary criminals, who drive second-hand white vans and pay for everything with cash. From your last paragraph, I think we basically agree.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      > After all, if you can research and understand the implications of application and messaging security, you can probably make a better living working at an IT desk somewhere than you can from stealing cars I doubt that. I think the main thing keeping cars safe from the 1% or so who don’t care about the law or ethics of theft is that it’s almost impossible to get away with it. Those with the relevant skill and the willingness to be criminals probably just take an easier approach, like card skimming. This belief is based on how much second hand cars are worth and therefore how few cars a thief would need to steal each month for a very big salary.
      - bloak 8y ago
        I think you can get away with it, if you know what you're doing, but a stolen car is worth a lot less than the same car sold second-hand legitimately. Probably you either have to sell it to someone who knows it's stolen, knows not to take it anywhere near a legitimate service centre, and is prepared to forfeit it if stopped by the police, or you break it up and sell the parts, or you have a way of smuggling it out of the country to somewhere where they don't care about where cars came from.
        josephg 8y ago
        Right; and this was my point in the first place. The police don't have to make it impossible to get away with stealing a car. They just need to make it difficult and awkward. Thats still enough to massively disincentivized car theft - which in turn has resulted in far fewer cars being stolen. Likewise if they ban end-to-end encrypted chat apps from the app stores, I bet that would decimate the number of people who used them. Even if anyone could just get an android phone and sideload signal, in practice adoption would still fall low enough to make law enforcement happy. Even amongst criminals.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  If this is a planned escape, a full tank and a couple of 20l jerry cans will get you from Land's End to John o' Groats, and back in a modern estate doing ~50mpg.
  - jowsie 8y ago
    Or just swap your plate for one from a same make and model you found on eBay. You can trigger ANPR's all you want and even the police vehicle mounted ones won't be cause for much suspicion.
    - colejohnson66 8y ago
      You don’t even need to buy a plate. If you’re gonna commit a crime, why not just swap it with someone else’s who has the same make and model?
      - oliwarner 8y ago
        It's not possible to legally purchase a plate for a registration you don't own. About 10 years ago the DVLA started to crack down on places printing plates without changing eligibility ahead of time. I know we're already talking about the law, and there are always ways around this, but you're probably better off sticking a foreign plate on the car.
        jstanley 8y ago
        It is easy to purchase a number plate for whatever text you like, e.g. https://www.myshowplates.com/ https://www.myshowplates.com/ I find this type of thing the easiest place to purchase number plates because they don't make you jump through a load of hoops with sending copies of the V5.
        oliwarner 8y ago
        I did say legally. The Road Safety Act 2006 requires suppliers of number plates to be registered and, looking at the law, I see no provision for the sale of "things that look like number plates but they're really not, honest guv". UK statute is painful to read and interpret though. I may have missed something.
- lotsofcows 8y ago
  But these are privately owned by the garage to report drive-aways. The context of this comment seems to imply these have something to do with the state?
  - jowsie 8y ago
    It's the police who generally have the most up to date database and are also the only people really able to do anything with the information (other than court summons, I guess). Regardless of who owns the ANPR, since their sole purpose (if you ignore the survelience aspect) is cutting down crime, the data will end up with the state eventually.
  - WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
    They all feed into the National ANPR Data Centre: www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni...
    - buckminster 8y ago
      No they don't. Those articles are referring to police ANPR cameras, not such cameras in general.
laichzeit0 8y ago
> Most interestingly are the justifications for these things. The problem is not so much the _initial_ justification. It's the inevitable "control creep" [1]. When something bad happens, they'll just go "hey we have this vast surveillance network in place, why don't we just re-use it for XYZ". That is the fundamental reason why people need to be so vigilant and militant against mass surveillance. Whatever the initial justification was for putting it in place is irrelevant in the long term. [1] Control creep is where the data generated for one form of governance is appropriated for another
- oliwarner 8y ago
  I honestly believe the "creep" is baked in, [at least partially] funding the whole thing. I can't see how the DVLA could alone justify plonking £10k in hardware, £30k in installation alongside a little rural road in the middle of Norfolk.
  - J-dawg 8y ago
    Yet the roads themselves are increasingly in a state of disrepair. Maybe the money wasted on this stuff could be the thing that finally gets people to care about it.
    - oliwarner 8y ago
      Those aren't pot-holes, they're traffic calming craters. They slow the terrorists down. Wrong kind of ice. Ah crap, I'm running out of excuses.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
rjsw 8y ago
> Most interestingly are the justifications for these things. Widespread ANPR means it's easy to find people who are driving their cars without MOT, VED and insurance. And doesn't even work, people use fake number plates.
- J-dawg 8y ago
  This is always the problem with this stuff (and perhaps is even by design). They always justify it by mentioning terrorists etc, but it's really used to keep normal, mostly "law-abiding" people in line. Real "bad guys" will always find a way around it.
- tjoff 8y ago
  How can it not be trivial to detect that in most cases? Must match make model and color with the number plate, also must make sure that the real number plate isn't used ~simultaneously somewhere distant.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    >tjoff posts on FaceBook: wow, this week vacation in Bahama is great! takes plate from car
    - smolder 8y ago
      How much of a problem are unregistered drivers in the UK actually? Or is this one of those anecdotes-turned-hypothetical-epidemic things lawmakers use to rally support?
    - majewsky 8y ago
      > takes car FTFY
  - Already__Taken 8y ago
    "match make model" sounds very difficult automatically from some traffic camera. "plate isn't used ~simultaneously somewhere" even if it is, which one is legit? And do what, dispatch the police immediately to both plates? It's also a question of not be caught _for how long_
lotsofcows 8y ago
"dinky little B-road near me has a 4×2 grid of ANPR cameras " How do you know they're ANPR? "I wish they'd fund health" How do you know they're state funded cameras?
- deadbunny 8y ago
  Because the ANPR system is state owned.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  > How do you know they're ANPR? Just a happy coincidence that a large portion of my job is interfacing booking systems with ANPR installations. The ones down the road are MAV cameras. Not cheap. Yeah, they might be using them as CCTV. But that's a lot of wasted money.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>Widespread ANPR means it's easy to find people who are driving their cars without MOT, VED and insurance. People without those are liabilities to us all, so we don't want them on the road, right? >It's just a happy coincidence that the security services also get to monitor more and more movement in the country. Automated and near-perfect enforcement of minor civil infractions sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me. I think you've got the scope creep backwards. They get all these systems in place by screaming about security and terrorists then say "well since the system is already here let's use it to keep our citizens on a tighter leash". Then they justify it vilifying these people who commit minor civil infractions as criminals when in reality they're your neighbors.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  There's a social phenomenon[1] where people are disproportionately critical of their socio-economic peers who try to cheat their way up the ladder. Benefits cheats. Tax dodgers. Petty smuggling. Daytime TV is littered —perhaps deliberately— with shows covering these sorts of crimes. My point is you don't even need to wheel out terrorism every time to get this stuff through comfortably. You can just play the social injustice card. [1]: I've completely forgotten the name of it. I've read a few studies on this and they're just amazing how strongly people feel about people unfairly getting one over on them. If anybody reading this knows the name of what I'm talking about, I'd appreciate a reply to remind me.
kevincox 8y ago
APNR is "Automatic number-plate recognition"

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago

Every petrol (gas) station has ANPR; which makes sense, you can't get too far before you have to fill up.

bloak 8y ago
If you're on the run, you've probably changed your number plate. If you're just an opposition politician being monitored, then where you buy petrol probably doesn't reveal very much about your activities. And you're probably using a card to pay for the petrol anyway.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- josephg 8y ago
  Sure; but it raises the bar for criminals. Ie, it makes being an effective criminal require more knowledge and more work. And that makes a huge difference in practice. How many criminals actually have good enough opsec to change the license plates on their car? I bet it’s well under 20%. And I know that an 80% solution kills me as an engineer, but I bet law enforcement sees an 80% solution as a massive win. Us technologists should know how much this stuff matters from the huge effect good design has on product adoption. (Or dark patterns on user behaviour). This is the same effect in action - changing defaults changes the behaviour of the majority. Another example: People say that “if you make guns illegal only criminals will have guns”. Yet here in Australia very few crimes are committed using firearms. This is the same effect in action. (I’m not arguing for gun control - just that these laws have an effect) And with that in mind, I think the reason why we’re finally seeing a big push from the 5 eyes is because finally, finally one of the big chat platforms (WhatsApp) has rolled out end to end encryption. That lowered the bar far enough that privacy from the government is becoming the default. One implication of this way of thinking is that it changes where the battle lines are. To win, the government doesn’t need to make end to end encryption impossible. They just need to make end to end encryption a bit difficult and non-obvious. Doing that will probably push the % of criminals who use proper encryption back into single digit percentages. After all, if you can research and understand the implications of application and messaging security, you can probably make a better living working at an IT desk somewhere than you can from stealing cars. Law enforcement would probably see that as a huge win, even if all us techies can keep sideloading Signal or whatever. Personally I don’t consider that good enough - I want a society where everyone has privacy. Not just those who have opted in to it.
  - bloak 8y ago
    I think a lot of petty criminals are driving vehicles which are not correctly registered. (I've heard about cases in which a cyclist has been hit by a white van, gone to the police with the van's number plate and been told: Oh, they don't seem to have registered themselves properly. Since no one's been killed we can't be bothered to investigate any further.) So a lot of this computer-based, large-scale surveillance is more effective against law-abiding political activists than it is against ordinary criminals, who drive second-hand white vans and pay for everything with cash. From your last paragraph, I think we basically agree.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    > After all, if you can research and understand the implications of application and messaging security, you can probably make a better living working at an IT desk somewhere than you can from stealing cars I doubt that. I think the main thing keeping cars safe from the 1% or so who don’t care about the law or ethics of theft is that it’s almost impossible to get away with it. Those with the relevant skill and the willingness to be criminals probably just take an easier approach, like card skimming. This belief is based on how much second hand cars are worth and therefore how few cars a thief would need to steal each month for a very big salary.
    - bloak 8y ago
      I think you can get away with it, if you know what you're doing, but a stolen car is worth a lot less than the same car sold second-hand legitimately. Probably you either have to sell it to someone who knows it's stolen, knows not to take it anywhere near a legitimate service centre, and is prepared to forfeit it if stopped by the police, or you break it up and sell the parts, or you have a way of smuggling it out of the country to somewhere where they don't care about where cars came from.
      - josephg 8y ago
        Right; and this was my point in the first place. The police don't have to make it impossible to get away with stealing a car. They just need to make it difficult and awkward. Thats still enough to massively disincentivized car theft - which in turn has resulted in far fewer cars being stolen. Likewise if they ban end-to-end encrypted chat apps from the app stores, I bet that would decimate the number of people who used them. Even if anyone could just get an android phone and sideload signal, in practice adoption would still fall low enough to make law enforcement happy. Even amongst criminals.
oliwarner 8y ago
If this is a planned escape, a full tank and a couple of 20l jerry cans will get you from Land's End to John o' Groats, and back in a modern estate doing ~50mpg.
- jowsie 8y ago
  Or just swap your plate for one from a same make and model you found on eBay. You can trigger ANPR's all you want and even the police vehicle mounted ones won't be cause for much suspicion.
  - colejohnson66 8y ago
    You don’t even need to buy a plate. If you’re gonna commit a crime, why not just swap it with someone else’s who has the same make and model?
    - oliwarner 8y ago
      It's not possible to legally purchase a plate for a registration you don't own. About 10 years ago the DVLA started to crack down on places printing plates without changing eligibility ahead of time. I know we're already talking about the law, and there are always ways around this, but you're probably better off sticking a foreign plate on the car.
      - jstanley 8y ago
        It is easy to purchase a number plate for whatever text you like, e.g. https://www.myshowplates.com/ https://www.myshowplates.com/ I find this type of thing the easiest place to purchase number plates because they don't make you jump through a load of hoops with sending copies of the V5.
        oliwarner 8y ago
        I did say legally. The Road Safety Act 2006 requires suppliers of number plates to be registered and, looking at the law, I see no provision for the sale of "things that look like number plates but they're really not, honest guv". UK statute is painful to read and interpret though. I may have missed something.
lotsofcows 8y ago
But these are privately owned by the garage to report drive-aways. The context of this comment seems to imply these have something to do with the state?
- jowsie 8y ago
  It's the police who generally have the most up to date database and are also the only people really able to do anything with the information (other than court summons, I guess). Regardless of who owns the ANPR, since their sole purpose (if you ignore the survelience aspect) is cutting down crime, the data will end up with the state eventually.
- WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
  They all feed into the National ANPR Data Centre: www.npcc.police.uk/FreedomofInformation/ANPR.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni...
  - buckminster 8y ago
    No they don't. Those articles are referring to police ANPR cameras, not such cameras in general.

laichzeit0 8y ago

> Most interestingly are the justifications for these things. The problem is not so much the _initial_ justification. It's the inevitable "control creep" [1]. When something bad happens, they'll just go "hey we have this vast surveillance network in place, why don't we just re-use it for XYZ". That is the fundamental reason why people need to be so vigilant and militant against mass surveillance. Whatever the initial justification was for putting it in place is irrelevant in the long term. [1] Control creep is where the data generated for one form of governance is appropriated for another

oliwarner 8y ago
I honestly believe the "creep" is baked in, [at least partially] funding the whole thing. I can't see how the DVLA could alone justify plonking £10k in hardware, £30k in installation alongside a little rural road in the middle of Norfolk.
- J-dawg 8y ago
  Yet the roads themselves are increasingly in a state of disrepair. Maybe the money wasted on this stuff could be the thing that finally gets people to care about it.
  - oliwarner 8y ago
    Those aren't pot-holes, they're traffic calming craters. They slow the terrorists down. Wrong kind of ice. Ah crap, I'm running out of excuses.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

rjsw 8y ago

> Most interestingly are the justifications for these things. Widespread ANPR means it's easy to find people who are driving their cars without MOT, VED and insurance. And doesn't even work, people use fake number plates.

J-dawg 8y ago
This is always the problem with this stuff (and perhaps is even by design). They always justify it by mentioning terrorists etc, but it's really used to keep normal, mostly "law-abiding" people in line. Real "bad guys" will always find a way around it.
tjoff 8y ago
How can it not be trivial to detect that in most cases? Must match make model and color with the number plate, also must make sure that the real number plate isn't used ~simultaneously somewhere distant.
- pixl97 8y ago
  >tjoff posts on FaceBook: wow, this week vacation in Bahama is great! takes plate from car
  - smolder 8y ago
    How much of a problem are unregistered drivers in the UK actually? Or is this one of those anecdotes-turned-hypothetical-epidemic things lawmakers use to rally support?
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > takes car FTFY
- Already__Taken 8y ago
  "match make model" sounds very difficult automatically from some traffic camera. "plate isn't used ~simultaneously somewhere" even if it is, which one is legit? And do what, dispatch the police immediately to both plates? It's also a question of not be caught _for how long_

lotsofcows 8y ago

"dinky little B-road near me has a 4×2 grid of ANPR cameras " How do you know they're ANPR? "I wish they'd fund health" How do you know they're state funded cameras?

deadbunny 8y ago
Because the ANPR system is state owned.
oliwarner 8y ago
> How do you know they're ANPR? Just a happy coincidence that a large portion of my job is interfacing booking systems with ANPR installations. The ones down the road are MAV cameras. Not cheap. Yeah, they might be using them as CCTV. But that's a lot of wasted money.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>Widespread ANPR means it's easy to find people who are driving their cars without MOT, VED and insurance. People without those are liabilities to us all, so we don't want them on the road, right? >It's just a happy coincidence that the security services also get to monitor more and more movement in the country. Automated and near-perfect enforcement of minor civil infractions sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me. I think you've got the scope creep backwards. They get all these systems in place by screaming about security and terrorists then say "well since the system is already here let's use it to keep our citizens on a tighter leash". Then they justify it vilifying these people who commit minor civil infractions as criminals when in reality they're your neighbors.

oliwarner 8y ago
There's a social phenomenon[1] where people are disproportionately critical of their socio-economic peers who try to cheat their way up the ladder. Benefits cheats. Tax dodgers. Petty smuggling. Daytime TV is littered —perhaps deliberately— with shows covering these sorts of crimes. My point is you don't even need to wheel out terrorism every time to get this stuff through comfortably. You can just play the social injustice card. [1]: I've completely forgotten the name of it. I've read a few studies on this and they're just amazing how strongly people feel about people unfairly getting one over on them. If anybody reading this knows the name of what I'm talking about, I'd appreciate a reply to remind me.

kevincox 8y ago

APNR is "Automatic number-plate recognition"