http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2007/241207_snoop.htm
The article describes the “mission creep” going on in our war on terrorism. While the purported reason for installing thousands of cameras in Manhattan is to protect us from terrorism, Manhattan seems an odd place to be spending to prevent terrorism. The cameras and license-plate readers will inevitably be used by government agencies on our own citizens, as has already been proven with the misuse of powers granted to federal agencies under the Patriot Act (the Pentagon snooped on peaceful protesters, students, and Quakers in the antiwar movement). This basically sums it up: “the electronic panopticon is not about terrorists or car thieves, it is about fine granularity surveillance of the population at large.”
Another facet of this mission creep is the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database, currently being used to disperse information between federal agencies. Though TALON’s stated goal is to fuse data regarding domestic terrorism, the criteria for what may be included are overly broad, namely “non-specific threats” and “suspicious activity”.
As if you didn’t already know, we’re on our way to becoming a police state…
Sadly, a police state presents us with some of the most exciting engineering challenge. Tracking that many people and doing data mining on a sample that size would be pretty interesting. Of course the same goes for weapons systems. They’re an exciting project to work on, you just might not want to be responsible for the final product.
amen. that’s why i decided against lockheed…killing people + more bureaucracy