London Watching

Staring in March, the British government says it will be able to track the movements of all vehicles on the road and record where they have been over the past several years. That's when a new central database will start operations. That database takes images from thousands of traffic cameras, which are being converted to automatically record license plate numbers of cars. The database will record when each image, some 35 million a day, was recorded along with the precise location of the vehicle. The images will be stored for two years, but the government is already talking about extending the storage time up to five years.