Imagine Google Earth with Real Time Capabilities Able to Search Anyones Location By a Click of a Mouse
Many may remember the Batman movie, The Dark Knight Returns starring Christian Bale. In the movie Batman searches in his computer for the jokers precise location and finds it down to the very floor of the building he is in. This technology has now become a reality and specialized police departments are beginning to use it to fight crime.“A new surveillance system that collects and records information in real-time — and then lets trackers rewind, zoom in and follow certain targets — has hit the test market streets of Baltimore, Md., and Dayton, Ohio, and in at least one crime-fighting unit in California,” the Washington Times reported.
The surveillance software sounds a lot like Google earth with real time and TIVO like capabilities, able to search any individuals location and associations through out their day. A law enforcement officer could track your daily voyage from when you leave your home in the morning until you return in the evening.
The system will be able to track your daily trends, where you travel to, who you are with, when you visit and for how long. Any crimes you may commit throughout your day could be used against you.
You may feel like you don’t do anything wrong and have nothing to hide but a recent article by the Wall Street Journal published that the average American commits 3 felonies a day, and the odds are you don’t even know it!
According to the Center of Investigative Reporting (CIR), the software uses facial recognition allowing the system to identify individuals located in the systems database.
“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” L.A. County sheriff’s Sgt. Doug Iketani told CIR. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
What happens to all the faces that are not targeted and recorded by this new Big Brother system?
Jennifer Lynch from the Electronic Frontier Foundation voiced her concern, “Once the nation has a facial recognition database, and once facial recognition capabilities improve to the point that we can identify faces in a crowd, it will become possible for authorities to identify people as they move through society.” This data could easily be merged with the criminal databases, these files are currently kept separate from each other.
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