On Feb 4, 8:36*pm, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 11:47:39 -0800 (PST), MIG





wrote:
On Feb 4, 5:43*pm, Mizter T wrote:
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.

The functionality is very limited and rudimentary in that it would allow
a blacklisted ticket to be detected or stopped. *There is not the
infrastructure to track magnetic tickets at journey or trip level. *The
other thing to bear in mind would be the huge volume of individual
serial numbers being generated each day and the lack of reuse of many
tickets. The data management overhead would be considerable.

We did look at this but it would have meant completely changing the
insides of every ticket encoding device *in the country* (that was
capable of issuing tickets through to LUL) *so that they could cope with
low and high coercivity magnetics. High coercivity would be needed to
prevent accidental or deliberate erasing of the coding in the stripe.
You would then need a tracking and data system. *Although there were
benefits they were not substantial enough to give a solid business case.
Smartcards offered far more because of the data capacity and pricing and
product flexibility never mind ease of use and updating.

In the early 1990s I was assured that this was possible. *(Didn't I
post it somewhere?). *My annual had been grabbed at a barrier, and I
was told that it could be tracked to find a pattern of use and catch
someone if they were using it.

You were told wrong then. *The only "tickets" with individual numbers
were staff passes and Freedom Passes. *Ordinary tickets did not have
individual serial numbers.

What if they were BR ones, as this was (it was a BR person who told
me)?

He didn't make it clear that that made a difference, but it might. It
wasn't just some gripper, it was the Revenue Protection person in the
office at Cannon Street (who seemed to think he was a TV cop).