Anti-terrorist police could face amassive bill for storing up to five years of data from
London's congestion charge camerasand
automatic number plate recognition system.
The Home Office last week gave the Metropolitan Police
permission for
routine real-time access to Transport for London's (TfL) 1,500 CCTV
cameras to track terrorist suspects' vehicles throughout the
city centre.
Home Office and police spokespeople declined to say how much the
scheme would cost, but CCTV experts said collecting all the data
from
TfL's network could require up to 8.8 exabyes of storage, and
drive the bill as high as £1.75bn.
In a statement to Parliament, minister of state for security,
counter-terrorism, crime and policing Tony McNulty said the Met
needed bulk number plate data from TfL's camera network in London
"specifically for terrorism intelligence purposes and to prevent
and investigate such offences".
"The infrastructure will allow the real-time flow of data
between TfL and the Metropolitan Police," he said.
A TfL spokesman said it keeps camera data for seven days. "I
don't know how the police plan to keep it for five years," he
said.
A police spokesman said it was unlikely that police would
monitor all traffic round the clock. Police would tap into TfL's
data stream only when they knew who they were looking for, limiting
the amount of storage space needed, he said.
Neither he nor the Home Office would comment on plans to include
data from privately owned CCTV cameras. However, he said this could
be possible on a case-by-case basis.
Chris Williams, marketing director of Wavelet Technology, said
Wavelet's CCTV technology helped police in their investigations of
the Glasgow car bomb and the 2005 bombs. "We understand the
evidentiary requirements of using CCTV data for securing
convictions," he said.
Williams said a single analogue camera working at 25 images per
second produced 3.2 terabytes of data in 24 hours. By
extrapolation, the TfL system would produce around 8.76 exabytes
over five years. (An exabyte is a million terabytes.)
Storage
technology firm Seagate is expected to introduce a digital
video recorder with a one terabyte capacity for about £200. This
would put the price of storing nearly 9 exabytes at some
£1.8bn.
Williams said by combining data from the automatic plate
recognition system to focus only on cases of known interest, police
would be able to cut their storage requirements, perhaps by
half.
The move to give police real-time access follows the use of data
from TfL's cameras to reconstruct the movements of the vehicles
involved in the two abortive
car-bomb
attacks in London's Park Lane area on 29 June.
The TfL spokesman said, "We have examined the technical issues
arising from this proposal, and are finalising protocols to ensure
the swift and secure transfer of the data in question."
McNulty said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner would report
to the Home Secretary in three months to review the operation, and
to the Information Commissioner annually.