Britain ups roadway surveillance tactics

LONDON, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Britain will boost its reputation as the surveillance capital of the West in March by recording movements of vehicles on the nation's roads, a report said.

New cameras will be added to Britain's already extensive roadside system to create the automatic number plate recognition, or ANPR, system to capture images of 50 million license plates a day -- data that will be stored two years, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

While police chiefs hailed the system as a crime-fighting and terror-fighting tool, civil liberties activists worried about potential abuses.

"Now like some scene in '1984,' the fact that we will travel and be detected and analyzed changes the whole psyche of the nation," Privacy International Director Simon Davies told the newspaper.

Davis likened the approach to "weeding with a bulldozer."

"Real criminals have cars that can't be traced anyway," said Nigel Humphries of the Association of British Drivers.

"Criminals use cars, it's as simple as that," said John Dean, who is coordinating rollout of ANPR.