"Ah," I thought, "so that's what an unmarked police car looks like. I wonder if there's a way to tell if a car belongs to the police..."

I suspect that if I issued a Freedom of Information request for the licence plates of all unmarked police cars, I would be swiftly rebuffed.

That set me thinking. If I were a nefarious criminal, how hard would it be to crowd source the information?

Assume, for a moment, that I am a modern day Fagin with a veritable army of feral children to do my malicious bidding. I position the children in crime hotspots and ask them to note down the number plates of any unmarked police car which has its "blues and twos" on. The children - armed perhaps with smartphones - could faithfully record the number plate, make and model, any specific markings, and take a photo of the car.

(As an aside, there was a reasonably popular thread on the PistonHeads forum which tracked unmarked cars for a while.)

Ok, so now we have a fairly comprehensive database of unmarked police cars. What can we do with it?

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) is the technology used by the police to spot cars and recognise their number plates. The police - or travel authority - can look up the number plate, issue fines, see if their insurance is valid, etc.

Optical Character Recognition is a complex technology, requiring massive computing power. Luckily, that power is readily available in modern smartphones.

So, as Fagin, I equip all my cars with two Android smartphones - one for the front, one for the rear. Have them continually run numberplate recognition, look up those plates in a remote database. Alert the driver if a suspected police car is near.

For more complexity, the app could check to see if the colour, make, and model match those on the database.

At the moment, one would need to have a considerable need to avoid unmarked cars and be prepared to expend a significant resource to generate the data needed in order to make this an effective counter-measure. For now, it's probably the preserve of well funded nation states.

But, buy a few autonomous drones to fly around the city - and the need for hiring expensive criminal children disappears. Computing power is only going to get cheaper, bringing this sort of activity well within the grasp of criminals everywhere.

Sousveillance is the opposite of surveillance. It's the act of watching the watchers. The above is an example of a potentially criminal use of ubiquitous computing to power a tracking infrastructure.

For people interested in civil liberties, sousveillance is a great way to keep tabs on the state - it will often use commodity hardware, crowd sourced participation, it is easily scaled, and very hard to defend against.

Technology is fundamentally morally neutral. It's our actions which determine whether a tool is used for good or evil. As technology drops in price, the infrastructure which was previously the preserve of Governments becomes available to the common man, and the common criminal.

The above could be considered an example of a movie-plot threat - it's probably not practical now, but it will be soon.

We will be living in interesting times indeed.

Sousveillance (pronounced /suːˈveɪləns/, French pronunciation: [suvɛjɑ̃s]) as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity,^[1] typically by way of small portable or wearable recording devices that often stream continuous live video to the Internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u804C65q_Jk

When this London Underground employee (now thought to be Ian Morbin) had a bad day at work, he thought, like the rest of us, that it would be forgotten by morning.  Many of us take our stresses out inappropriately - whether it's on the call centre worker or a traffic warden - occasionally on a customer.  What he hadn't counted on was Jonathan Macdonald whipping out his camera and recording the event.  We're wearily resigned to CCTV monitoring our every move - but handheld cameras present a more intimate and dispassionate view of events.

Expanding on my comments in the original post -

The pro-gun lobby often says "A well armed society is a polite society." The implication being that you don't go around being aggressive when anyone could pull a gun on you.

With the rise of sousveillance -  I wonder if we'll see a rise in professionalism and politeness. Because, you never know who is recording for posterity.

There are two problems I have with this:

1. It relies on those higher up to do something. If this Ian chap doesn't get disciplined - what has been achieved? Nothing. Similarly, if after all the videos of police abuses of power (G20, climate camp etc.) no officer gets punished / the rule aren't changed - it's all been for naught.
2. I think people should be polite and professional because IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Not because they're afraid of being punished. Call me old fashioned, but I want to live in a world where people are respectful to one and other - not merely afraid of being caught out.

I hope that "Ian" doesn't lose his job - I hope that he realises what an arse he has been and learns to treat customers with a bit more respect.

This video is presented out of context and - although I trust Jonathan's reporting of events - we do only have his word for it.  He may very well have chopped off the footage which completely exonerates Ian.  Although I can't quite conceive what that would be.

Meta

It's interesting to notice how the blogosphere reacts to these events.  Multiple repostings often fail to mention the originating site.  The conversation is split between YouTube, Jonathan's blog and those who have reposted it.

Is it better to keep conversations separate in this way? Leave the drooling YouTube commentators  away from the TFL blogs - or should diverse communities try to interact to keep a canonical view of what is being said about this incident?

Dear Sir or Madam,

Office 4825 of the British Transport Police refused to show my his ID or Warrant Card when asked. I had been stopped under S.44(2) of The Terrorism Act 2000. The incident happened at around 0854BST on 19/08/2008.

The officer was, I consider, rude and unprofessional. He made a protracted phone call using what appeared to be a private mobile phone (not on the TETRA system) indicating personal information about me and my whereabouts. He would not give me any information about the call.

I have captured the incident on camera and you may view it at politics.phreadz.com/p/15ROH206TI2T/

I would like the following
1) Confirmation that this man is indeed a member of the British Transport Police.
2) Details about whether this man was correct not to show me his identification.
3) Details of the phone call he placed concerning me. Please let me know if I need to submit a separate FOI request for this. [In retrospect, I think I should be asking under the DPA not the FOIA]

Many thanks

Terence Eden

I was impressed with their speed of response. Less than 24 hours.

Mr. Eden

I can confirm that Officer 4825 is a British Transport Police Officer.

If an officer is in plain clothes he is obliged to show identification

In respect of the telephone call that was made, I cannot assist with that.

Regards

William Farrell

PSD Office Manager

It is correct, so I discover from investigation, that uniformed officers don't have to show ID. I think that's a shame. If they've got nothing to hide, they've got nothing to fear.

I really don't think I can be bothered chasing this with the BTP any further. I've stood up to authority and survived. I will continue to write to my MP and keep the money flowing to Liberty.

Many thanks to Cory at Boing Boing for featuring my story. To QIK for providing a streaming service. To Kosso at Phreadz for creating a fantastic video discussion forum. Thanks also for all those who've blogged and digged this (sorry if I missed any). Please keep the comments, tweets and jaikus coming in - it's been fascinating to read both the positive and negative views people have of my actions.

Finally, a huge amount of love and respect to my wife, Liz, for not making me sleep on the sofa last night ;-) She understands me like no one else.

This blog now returns to wittering about QR Codes, mobile phones and Shakespeare.

(Note - the Qik video service died in 2015 and I rehosted a copy of the video on YouTube. The video is missing a few minutes from the end.)

So, is my antagonistic whining at the police useful in any way? In my twisted mind, I see this as a good thing... sometimes. I believe it's up to all of us to occasionally turn around and say "Are you allowed to do that?" To say "Why?" I'm not trying to be melodramatic, but I don't think that enough people perform checks on authority. Power, so they say, corrupts. We've seen how police can be used against the population in Zimbabwe and other countries.

Now, I'm not naive enough to claim "OMFG POLICE STATE!" to being stopped - annoying and distressing as it is. Britain is a hell of a lot better than many other countries. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make it even better.

A lot of people (especially those whose parents escaped Europe during the war) are vigilant - perhaps over vigilant - against the return of fascism. And the first step towards that kind of rule is to stir up fear and hate in the population and use the civilian police for political purposes. Hence, I suppose, the emotional response.

The UK is not a police state. But it's up to each of us to make sure it doesn't become one. It's up to us to vote, to talk to our MPs, to expose violence and intimidation.

Let me make one thing clear; I have enormous respect for the police. They do a tough job and get a lot of abuse for it. I'm too much of a coward to put myself in harm's way every day like they do. The Security Services' failures are very public - and their successes are very private. We often only get to see the "bad" side of them. That distorts our perception of the work they do to keep all of us safe.

Some people have said that I'm a dick, that I'm looking for my 15MB of fame (excellent turn of phrase), that I'm goading the police for a reaction.
Others think I'm highlighting security theatre, a citizen journalism hero, that I was perfectly reasonable.
Those are a selection of people's thoughts. There are more on digg.

Ultimately, I'm conflicted. I feel that it's right to highlight the silliness of these random searches. I feel that my right to free speech has been exercised and I'm hugely grateful that I live in a society that values and respects the free discourse of ideas.
However, I should have handled it better. I should have been calmer and more professional. I don't think I was in any serious danger of being carted away - but it terrifies me that had I slipped and made comment too provocative I'd now be in jail for 28 days.

I'm grateful to James Bridle for filing a Freedom of Infomation request to the Home Office, via What Do They Know. If these "random" stop and searches result in a significant number of arrests and prosecutions; I'll accept that I'm a hysterical moaner and let them get on with it. If, however, all it accomplishes is to piss off innocent citizens.....

Please, if you care about your freedoms in the UK, join Liberty.

Night all.

(This post comprises a distillation of a number of tweets, comments on digg, phreadz and conversations with people. I'll update it with trackbacks to other blogs covering this when I get some free time.)