We Brits are the most sur­veilled nation on the planet with more cam­eras per square acre than every­one else put together. Geeklawyer hates that. He hates the future police plan for auto­matic num­ber plate recog­ni­tion (ANPR) that enables the capa­bil­ity that when­ever he charges around on ‘The Ter­ri­ble and Inex­orable Wrath of God’ he will be watched and logged and his route and dal­liances recorded in the Police National Com­puter. Oh sure, its all for his own good, to make him safe; it helps deny the roads to crim­i­nals and ter­ror­ists — yada yada.

What made him chuckle was the response of the Home Office to the Sur­veil­lance Commissioner’s asser­tion that these cam­eras were prob­a­bly ille­gal by their use and intru­sive­ness. Did the Home Office and cops pause for thought? did they say “oooh, we appear to have over­stretched our­selves. Ultra Vires. Let us desist.”

No, the Home Office said that it would con­sider whether pri­mary leg­is­la­tion was needed to deal with the prob­lem. Tony Bliar said, boasted indeed — weirdly, a while back that if the police asked him for some­thing he would give it to them, period. A more extreme exam­ple of a long multi-party approach to police powers.

Geeklawyer wishes, for­lornly that he’ll yield, that gov­ern­ments would resist the pop­ulist urge to play ‘we are harder than you other par­ties’ pol­i­tics with civil lib­er­ties. The police don’t need these omni­scient sur­veil­lance pow­ers, they just want them: if you keep yield­ing to every demand can you won­der they become spoilt?

You may be a bit sur­prised there­fore when Geeklawyer says that the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for claim­ing ille­gal­ity seems a lit­tle shakey. He can­not say that he regards a num­ber plate as per­sonal data nor even the images of dri­vers cap­tured by such devices. Geeklawyer’s pic­ture does not, yet, iden­tify him by name address or such­like; nor does a num­ber plate always iden­tify the dri­ver, a fam­ily car dri­ven by a son or friend for exam­ple, though it will often do so indi­rectly in most cases. The broader prob­lem this com­plaint addresses inad­e­quately is that data pro­tec­tion leg­is­la­tion is being shoe­horned into a role it wasn’t directly designed for: the role of pro­tect­ing the cit­i­zen from the state.

Geeklawyer is not say­ing that he likes ANPR, very far from it and he’ll prag­mat­i­cally set­tle for interim rul­ings of ille­gal­ity, but we need a more rig­or­ous and intel­lec­tu­ally self-consistent char­ter of civil lib­er­ties in the UK. Some chance.