Yeah, I would have thought the London Congestion Zone would qualify - also they read vehicles exiting the zone too, so would read M/C plates then.

“When we look at the bigger picture in terms of Hertfordshire, as well as nationally, the position of the cameras makes a lot of sense strategically to target those criminals travelling into the county on the main roads in that area – not to mention counter-terrorism."

If they were actually targeting 'those criminals" and terrorists, that would be one thing. But they are targeting everyone and storing your movements for at least two years.

Oh, well, if the police think it's helpful, what could possibly go wrong....

+Kevin Dunseath By criminals, I think they really mean, uninsured, untaxed cars. Which of course are often used by real criminals and terrorists. /s

Here is one good thing about America, or Los Angeles anyway. Our city council just told everyone to ignore the stop light camera tickets. Don't pay them, they said, we're taking them away. Go team America!

Seems we're going down a road (sic) of ubiquitous, automated surveillance. But at least for the moment, it's reactive not pre-emptive. Nobody's actually watching until after the crime. And even then, it's rarely useful in itself.

There was a wonderful story of a motorcycle being stolen right outside a Police station foyer. It was bundled into a van. There must have been all sorts of surveillance but the Police dropped and closed the case within 24 hours due to lack of leads or detail. Speed cameras have almost all been turned off because nobody's got the money to process the images. The whole thing about cameras seems to be that it's theatre designed to discourage and keep society in just enough of a state of fear to keep between the white lines. The exception to this is the few places that are now completely automatic such as the congestion charge. Or the ANPR interceptors where there's a pair of policemen driving round waiting for the exception to flash up.

Thats just infrastructure waiting for effective computing power. Luckily, its still a hard computing problem to analyze video. We're 'sort of' getting some solutions to that problem with facial recognition, where the consumer can now see some automated image tagging in their photo management tools. Recognizing complex actions in video is still very difficult, so we can't get good metadata on that yet. Automated tagging should be awe inspiring to people that understand the implications, and not necessarily in a good way.

Converting audio to text is more straightforward, and searches of text and metadata can be done in large volume, to identify keywords, key strings and trends. Subsequently, you can have automated search technology listening to everything the world types and says over telecommunications networks, order to spot 'hot' activity, which enforcement can be directed towards.

As for police cameras, last time I was in the UK, I was told the hoodies had figured out if you just wear a hooded sweater, and maybe an anarchy mask, you can't be identified by the cameras. Also, they all knew where the cameras weren't, so where the camera was, was clear of crime, but since on the street police were scaled back to save costs because of the 'excellent' protection from the cameras, everywhere a camera wasn't, the crime had gone up.

Of course, there is the possibility that the serviceable life on all the cameras will run out before they can be used for anything. Then it will be too expensive to repair them all, and they might all get taken down... then some of those great driving roads might open back up to some nice sports car action when no one is looking. That would be wonderful, in my opinion.

My guess is that some company convinced that city they needed to put the system in place to generate test data for their analysis tools. If they have a nice big database of activity on those cameras, then they have a data mining opportunity for algorithms they might be testing.

+Mark Strachan Quite likely. But at a county level, not town level. The whole point being that Royston sits at a bit of a crossroads so a lot of traffic in Eastern England goes near it at some stage. But it's small enough that it doesn't take a huge number of cameras.

There's a bizarre stat about the county it sits in, Hertfordshire. If all the cars in the county were on the road at the same time, they'd take up more than the total road space. That may be apocryphal!