On 4 Feb, 17:11, Roland Perry wrote:

In message
, at
08:01:36 on Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Mizter T remarked:

I think the police have always had full access to the
Congestion Charging system and cameras right from the start.

There was a specific change to allow this. Probably after 7/7.

OK, I'll have to check that out then.


If the police were allowed to have live access to the database or to
do data-mining 'fishing trips' (to mix my analogies) then confidence
in the system would evaporate, there would be a massive uproar and
people would kick up a big fuss,

I think most people would probably believe the access is already taking
place, but in secret.

Perhaps they do, perhaps it is. Though if there is some kind of
secretive access to the database it would be being done by GCHQ as
opposed to the police, and they would basically only be interested in
'terrorists' and the like (the question would then be whether they'd
also be interested in tracking e.g. a militant organiser of mass
strikes - I'd think it unlikely). Oh, and spies I suppose. But I'd
think spies and indeed others 'up to (serious amounts of) no good'
would either simply not use Oyster or would otherwise use measures to
frustrate anyone attempting to track them via Oyster.

A follow on question is then the extent to which the infrastructure of
magnetic card tickets allows for tracking to take place. I'm not even
sure that individual magnetic tickets have their own unique serial
number (on the mag strip that is), which is basically what would be
required to track people using this system.