Police forces across Britain are piloting an artificial-intelligence system that monitors and categorizes drivers’ movements using the nation’s vast automatic number plate recognition network. Internal records obtained by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph show that three regional organized crime units are testing software built by Faculty AI to analyze entire journeys—rather than single sightings—and label routes deemed “suspicious.” The system learns from historic data tied to criminal travel patterns, particularly those associated with “county lines” drug trafficking.

Dubbed Operation Ignition, the project marks a major shift in scale and ambition. Instead of officers manually flagging vehicles, machine-learning models generate their own lists of potential targets, potentially involving millions of registrations drawn from more than 100 million daily ANPR sightings. While authorities frame the rollout as a technical trial, documents indicate plans for wider adoption. Civil liberties advocates warn that such tools rarely remain limited to their original purpose, raising concerns that predictive surveillance could expand well beyond serious crime into routine monitoring of ordinary travel.

SOURCE: Reclaim the Net