HMP Britain

Police ANPR database contains 7.6 billion car locations and images, the NPIA have acknowledged in a FOIA disclosure to HMP Britain.

The National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) operate the National ANPR Data Centre (NADC) which stores information from CCTV surveillance cameras. Each time a car passes one of these cameras, the location of the car, the time, an image of the car (and often, its occupants) and the numberplate is stored at the NADC. This data comprises a ‘read’.

There are now 7.6 billion of these reads in the Police database and they are routinely stored for 2 years.

In an internal document [pdf] under the section entitled ‘Proposed Media Lines to Take’, the NPIA
state:

Q. This is just the government spying on the people,isn’t it?
No. This is simply a tool for identifying vehicles where a road traffic offence has been committed or where criminal activity is
suspected

Amusingly, the same documents details how each camera sucks up information on everyone and stores it on a database for two years. Of course, the police aren’t lying: they do only store data on areas where criminal activity suspected. The problem is they suspect every innocent motorist of criminal activity across the whole road network.

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