I took the pictures below on Essex Road in Islington in February.
The vehicle concerned was not monitoring a bus lane, and it was a good three quarters of a mile south of the congestion zone. The van, which appears to be registered to Capita, was solely concerned with monitoring people and vehicles as they went about their business.
Since then I have seen the vehicle just passed Whipps Cross Hospital, again randomly monitoring passers by.
It does not make me feel any safer, but its a nice little earner, no doubt at public expense, for Capita.
I plugged the phone no. in the 2nd picture into Google and came up with Transport for London's low emission zone (see http://www.lowemissionzones.eu/content/view/59/205/).
If the vehicle's owned by Crapita, that makes a nice addition to their TV detector van fleet. Nice to see private enterprise is getting its share of the spoils of the surveillance state.
Posted by: Woodsy | March 30, 2008 at 10:09 AM
The notice in the second image does have the word "LEZ" i.e Low Emission Zone, written on the very top line.
Were you aware that all of the Transport for London camera data from the two Congestion Charge zones, from the much larger Low Emission Zone and from any other TfL traffic or Tube or Bus cameras is now being handed over to the Metropolitan Police Service in bulk, in real time, in secret for "national security" data mining of everybody's traffic movement patterns i.e. not just for specific investigations of terrorist suspects ?
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith signed a Ministerial Certificate exempting this data trawling from the Data Protection Act last July
See:
"Surveillance State Function Creep - London Congestion Charge "real-time bulk data" to be automatically handed over to the Metropolitan
Police etc."
http://spyblog.org.uk/2007/07/surveillance_state_function_creep_london_congestion_charge_realtime_bulk_data.html
Posted by: Watching Them, Watching Us | March 30, 2008 at 03:31 PM