At odd times when I’ve got nothing better to do – which, being a blogger, by definition I often don’t – I find myself wondering about the Selfless Ones who rule so wisely over us.  What lies behind the media image?  What are they really like in their private lives?

For example, just now I am wondering what Britain’s top policemen, the Chief Constables, are like in mufti.  What kind of chaps are they after the last funny handshake of the day, when they can go home and set down the dizzying burden of power?

Are they, for example, basically just the ordinary bloke who likes a beer in the clubhouse after eighteen holes on a Saturday morning?  Or are they more the type who disappears into the loft for hours at a stretch to be alone with his complete collection of dog-eared 1950’s Parade magazines.

I feel entitled to wonder because, as was rumoured five weeks ago, these Chief Constable chappies have been doing a lot of wondering about what you and I do.  And now they’ve hit upon one (devilishly complicated and expensive) way of getting at the answers:-

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.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

As one would expect, this development has not gone unnoticed by libertarians.  Predictably, their concern is the abrogation of power which it will clearly entail.  Libertarians see the extension of the power of coercion in everything the representatives of the state decide to do.  Maybe they’re right, as far as it goes.  But it generally requires that the reasons given by said representatives for their decisions be untruths or, at least, half-truths.  Not impossible, and that’s where I began this piece, after all.  But are the Selfless Ones inevitably all just liars and graspers after power?  Does power really always corrupt, rendering government nothing more than a conspiracy against the people?  Or is there some other, more wry, even more human explanation for the way things turn out?

Well, in the case of this mega-surveillance system the raison d’etre is to “revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis.”  But that isn’t the whole story because there is also the bit about, “the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.”

Suddenly, we are in a whole new ball game.  This, unquestionably, is spying on the population.  Yes, yes, I know there are road-side checks now and a big, new high-tech CCTV-based system would be so much more efficient.  But efficiency invites what the military call “mission creep”, and checking your Vehicle Licence, insurance and MOT status 24/7 is certainly that.

Well, enter the BNP – the oddest bed-mate for race-blind, freedom-junkie Samizdatistas but never mind.  The BNP journalist also fingers the civil liberties issue … “much more an important civil liberties issue than a subject of technological interest”, he rightly says.  But then comes the question which so superior, cynical Samizdata presumes to know better than to ask, “What is it for?”

It’s a good question.

Perhaps it is for the gathering of information and detection of those who evade insurance, MOT and road tax?

The DVLA already holds this information and thousands of car owners receive warnings and reminders before effective action is taken against evaders such as clamping or removal.  A network of ANPR cannot be justified on these grounds.

Perhaps it is for the gathering of information to prevent a terrorist attack?

… Despite the thousands of CCTV cameras on the rail network, London Underground and London streets, the terrorists still managed to detonate devices on 07/07.  Further the four 7th of July London suicide bombers seem to have hired a car and drove their bombs to a mainline railway station i.e. one single apparently innocent journey.  The National ANPR Database would have been useless in warning of this sort of terrorist attack.

Perhaps … the network is needed to keep rogue drivers and criminal gangs off British roads because the data will be analysed by the police.

On this last, the BNP journalist is at his weakest, merely pointing out that the system itself might be a tempting target for cyber criminals.  To my mind he would have been better pointing out that the CCTV will be fooled by a simple switch to false index plates.  It’s a hell of an investment to make simply to have crims screw on a couple of false plates to their getaway vehicle.

So can it be that the system is really not justified on crime-fighting grounds … that the Home Office and the Chief Constables know that, but the attractions of general surveillance are just too great to pass up?  In other words, it

is

a conspiracy against the people.

Well, we don’t know and nor do the Samizdatistas or the boys at the BNP.  But this is my best guess as to what’s gone on:-

Actually, our off-duty Chief Constable doesn’t play golf and doesn’t disappear into his loft to gaze upon the double delectations of 1950’s girls-next-door.  He is an endlessly ambitious, single-minded workaholic who is never fully off-duty, and for whom the nearest thing to a leisure interest is gazing at the delectatious gigabyte porn in HotWired Magazine (which he brings home from the office dutifully every Friday evening).

The idea for a mega-surveillance system came to him in the shower - always a problem area for those fixated on surveillance.  Despite HotWired Magazine, he didn’t have the technical nous to work up his thoughts into a finished form.  But there had to be some career-boosting brownie points in getting off a memo to the Home Office before some other bastard beat him to it.  What would a system like that be for?  Not important yet.  The main thing was to stake a claim to its authorship.

It was the Under-Secretary for National Policing Strategy at the Home Office to whom the memo was addressed.  Unluckily for us, he too has ambitions and he too knows a saleable commodity when he sees one.  And off went his diligent but noticeably self-promotional memo to the Permanent Secretary, cc the Minister for State.  And so on.

Perhaps someone somewhere eventually said, “Absolutely not … the prospect fills me with revulsion.  Look at the civil liberties issues, for God’s sake.”  But, you know, must stop AQ blah, blah … any measures that might help blah.  Who can hold out against that?  It would be certain political death if the terrorists got lucky the one time, and some backstabbing swine leaked the story of an aborted, wondrous mega-surveillance system.

And so we arrive at today’s story in the Independent.  As you see, in explaining the habitual offending of the Selfless Ones and their utterly useless government I tend to the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory.  But who knows?  We aren’t the ones with the cameras.