International Law

Borders and Lothian Police ANPR data mining for "ethical income generation" and "creating and exploiting business opportunities" for Northgate Information Solutions

We will eventually get around to fisking Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's Communications Data Bill and dodgy history of terrorism speech, but here is another "database state" function creep announcement:

It appears that Northgate Information Solutions, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Lothian & Borders Police, regarding some sort of Automatic Number Plate Recognition data mining service. This is not some enhanced add on anlysis software package simply for use internally, to help the Police make sense of the masses of ANPR data which they are collecting, the vast makority of which is on innocent motorists.

This deal follows the recommendation by Sir Ronnie Flanagan in his final report that police forces should ensure they are taking an entrepreneurial approach to policing in ethical income generation and in creating and exploiting business opportunities.

Examples of how the new service can be used include -

? Several robberies have occurred in a region - the services can be used to establish what vehicles were in the vicinity, allowing further investigations to be undertaken including direct access to the regional force crime and intelligence systems to establish what is known about these vehicles;

? An incident involving a vehicle has occurred and the police have nothing to go on other than the make, model and colour of the vehicle. Using the services the police can establish which registrations match with this make, model and colour and which of these have been spotted in the vicinity of the incident.

The vast majority of these vehicles and registrations in these two example scenarios will be of innocent drivers.

Presumably Northgate Information Services are hoping to sell this service, and the raw data and data mining analyses, including the traffic movements of innocent people caught by the ANPR surveillance infrastructure, to other Police Forces or other Governments or commercial companies, for a commercial profit, without the informed prior consent of any of the innocent motorists.

Northgate Information Systems used be McDonnell Douglas Information Systems. and are still American owned.They do a lot of business with central and local government, and had some of the Government websites and servers which they run, including the offical Labour Party website whisch they hosted at the time, disrupted by the massive Buncefield fuel depot fire and explosion near Hemel Hempstead, literally across the road from some of their offices.

See the Northgate Information Systems Press release Police forces across the UK to benefit from innovative new intelligence service:

Full post as published by Spy Blog on October 18, 2008 (boomark / email).