somebody is following you

The BBC has been running a story about the police gaining real time access to the London Congestion charge data. They seem to have not realised the full importance of the story. It isn't that they are getting real time access to the data that is important. The important point is they now have access to the data without having to produce any reason for it. The police tracking of everybody's movements in London, if by car (access to the Oyster Card data isn't going to be far behind), just became routine. Routinely following every law abiding driver is yet another of Labour's worrying erosions of Liberty especially as they are blackmailing various other cities to install road charging systems which will inevitably be used to give the police more power to track peoples movements and from the core of the nationwide monitoring system that will eventually track every single road journey in the UK.

UPDATE

Spyblog has more details on this appalling new piece of mass surveillance.