Evidence, if you ever needed it, that surveillance cameras are getting smarter:
Britain’s first digital speed cameras are being installed today and will go “live” next month.
The new “super cameras”, which need no film or servicing, are being tested at Limehouse, in east London. With traditional cameras, motorists hope that there is no film in the camera and that they can get away with speeding.
But there will be no escape with the new digital version, which sends a stream of images and data along a phone line to a Metropolitan Police centre in Kent.
The first cameras are being installed at the Limehouse Link tunnel, which is an accident blackspot. Surveys have shown that drivers of nearly all of the 80,000 vehicles using the tunnel each day break the 30mph speed limit.
In the last three years, 14 accidents there have led to death or serious injury.
And evidence too of why surveillance cameras are widely believed to be a good thing, not just by the surveilling classes, but by the surveilled also.
