Mindless photography

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Nor is it to speculate on the appetite of administrations of every political stripefor the newest technologies of social regulation. What interests me is the closedcircuit of the technological system itself.The Central London Congestion Charging system was introduced on 17February 2003 (fig. 1.1). Under its provisions, between 7:00 a.m. and 6:30p.m. on weekdays, cars are charged £8 a day to enter an eight square mile area stretching from Tower Bridge in the east to Hyde Park in the west andbounded to the north and south by the so-called ‘Inner Ring Road’. Driverspay the charge in advance by telephone, using credit cards, by text message, bylogging on to an internet site or at post offices, petrol stations and retail outlets,and at self-service machines located in car parks. Information on those whohave paid is logged into a centralized database, while, on the streets of CentralLondon, almost seven hundred analogue cameras positioned at entry pointsto the restricted area, at other points within it, and on a number of mobileunits, record the number plates of vehicles passing through the narrow field ofview of their lenses. The cameras send live video images over secure fibre-optic communications lines to a secret, central ‘hub’ site, operated under contractby private sector service providers. Here, automatic number plate recognitiontechnology identifies and reads each vehicle registration mark in the imagestream, compiling an evidential record for use in enforcement actions againstdrivers who have not paid the charge.At midnight each day, the ‘hub’ site computers delete the registration numbersof the cars whose owners have paid and relay the plate numbers of those whohave not to another computer and thence to the Driver and Vehicle LicensingAgency in Swansea. This government records centre has databases containingthe specifications of all of Britain’s twenty-eight million vehicles. The datareceived from the ‘hub’ site is then checked against these records and the namesand addresses of defaulters are forwarded to a third centre in Coventry, whichissues the penalty notices, doubling the original cost of the congestion chargefor payments after 10:00 p.m. and imposing a £100 fine on those who have notpaid by midnight. 1 All this takes place through an automated system connectedto existing databases and systems of administration, while the use of analoguecameras ensures the conformity of enforcement processes with the evidential requirements of the courts.It is not, however, the connection of camera to data storage and recordretrieval systems that is new. The incorporation of record photography innineteenth-century policing, medicine, psychiatry, engineering, social welfareand geographical surveys always depended on the deployment of a compositemachine – a computer – in which the camera with its inefficient chemicalinformation storage system was hooked up to the file cabinet with its organi-zational cataloguing system, constituting for the late nineteenth century a newinformation technology that would radically redirect the public and legislativefunctions of the archive.What is striking about the London traffic control systemis that cameras, records, files and computers are all involved but, except where