Smile for Big Brother

"Cameras scan and record the vehicle registration marks of every passing car. The numbers are then cross-checked against a number of databases, including the Police National Computer, the DVLA databases and police intelligence records, both locally and regionally, to identify vehicles of interest to officers."

Communist Russia? Iraq under Saddam Hussein? Not quite... Welcome to Britain.

As the UK government launch the imposition of a nationwide roadside camera network with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), linked to a variety of police and government databases on a nation of unsuspecting and, more importantly, predominantly innocent UK citizens, we must each determine for ourselves whether we are prepared to suffer technologies of mass control in the hands of an increasingly unaccountable few in supposedly 'free' and 'democratic' countries.