Re: Are we surprised?
ANPR.
If they're so connected, and so effective, and so monitored to be a threat to us all, why are DVLA having to have an ad campaign to try and frighten road tax dodgers to go and pay their road duty? And why was one of our household cars driven far and wide for twelve months with no MoT, an omission on our part that only came to light when we booked in for the subsequent annual MoT? And why do some people *cough* routinely exceed motorway speed limits on some of the most heavily be-camerad routes without getting their collar felt?
By their own admission the public sector approach to finding needles in haystacks is simply collecting more hay. In the modern world, the best approach to protecting our privacy would be inciting the public sector to collect even more data - eg lobbying MPs for "the authorities" to have a compulsory real time feed from all commercial security cameras. The resultant zetabytes of data would be absolutely useless, but the civil servants would bathe in the vast, irrelevant pool of binary data, and be unable to find anything in it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
