NW Leics District Council – hotbed of spies ?

On the 25th Feb 2010 North West Leicestershire Council in the English ‘East Midlands’ held its regular Full Council meeting, with all Councillors and senior officers present. The main subject was the 2010-11 budget, (as well as local protests over excessive housebuilding on green land in between villages).

During the budget discussions an elected spokesman for the ruling Conservative (Tory) Party administration at the Council, enthusiastically praised himself, council officers and his fellow Conservative Councillors for having obtained extra funding from Central Government for street cameras with number plate recognition software.

What is this technology, you may ask ? These cameras record which cars are driving where and at what time, so they have your picture and they know who owns the car, where the car is kept, when the insurance is due, and it marries up this information with camera scans of you and your car obtained elsewhere.

Your whereabouts may have commercial implications, or carry some type of domestic confidentiality. For example, a woman may have a mildly jealous husband, but she wishes to take some expensive medicines to carers for a seriously ill ex-boyfriend. She may wish to protect the confidentiality of her visit, for benefit of all. An employee of the Council may wish to visit a prospective new employer, or a private sector employee a rival firm for a job interview. Someone may wish to keep an evening job confidential.

There are many reasons why the general public wish to go about their business without being watched by an unelected faceless official. People are used to a general right of privacy from government, in Britain. That’s why we don’t have ID cards, or random police roadblocks as in dodgy countries run by dictators. We are a democracy and we want to keep it that way – and not give too much power over us to the expense-swindling government-of-the-day.  One reason for this is that in reality the faceless officials are not so faceless. They are human – open to error, mistake and occasional illegality or money-making on the side. Power corrupts.

But now, in Coalville, someone somewhere has access to your movements and whereabouts. Who is it ? How is the information stored ? Who has access to it ? Can it be sold or passed on to other agencies ? Can people processing you photos and car number plate scans use the information for gain ? What if one of the people involved is the (for example) jealous, or even abusive, husband ? Can the information get lost on a disk on a train, as often happens ?

The District Council have provided no information on this, but surely they should. Is it not our democratic right to know what detailed information is being ‘secretly’ collected on us in this way, and to be able to verify in detail, the inevitable bland assurances that we will be given when such issues are raised ?

In the current centralised way in which the UK government is organised, large ‘extra budget’ sums are never given by central government to a local authorities without conditions. What information is being passed on by North West Leicestershire District Council and to whom ?

As has been widely reported in the press, local authorities already have wide powers to find out about our web browsing and to read our private emails – on very trivial grounds indeed, like how we put out or household rubbish (!). Now they can check where we are going and when in our cars.

The justification is often ‘terrorism’ but this cannot surely be valid, because terrorist suspects can be tracked using powers given by the courts against individuals, not the whole population. Mass information on millions just clogs up the system. Ultimately information collected for terrorism purposes is only as good as the human beings that monitor and analyse it – and there will never be enough analysts to monitor the whole population.

Of course we all know the answer. Information stored on the general population will end up being used for trivial purposes. That is the nature of government as we have already seen, and the general public need powers to protect themselves against this.

Meanwhile we shall wait to see if NW Leics District Council come clean about all this, or whether we have to drag our rights kicking and screaming from them !

Paul Reynolds  Feb 26 2010

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