As for those endless pictures everyone so cheerfully uploads to Facebook (which has the largest facial recognition database in the world) or anywhere else on the internet, they're all being accessed by the police, filtered with facial recognition software, uploaded into the government's mammoth biometrics database and cross-checked against its criminal files. With good reason, civil libertarians fear these databases could "someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas."
As these police practices and data collections become more widespread and routine, there will be no one who is spared from the indignity of DNA sampling, blood draws, and roadside strip and/or rectal or vaginal searches, whether or not they've done anything wrong.
Yet as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these databases, forced extractions and searches are not for our benefit. They will not keep us safe. What they will do is keep us mapped, trapped, targeted and controlled.
How do you protect yourself against having your blood forcibly drawn, your DNA extracted, your biometrics scanned and the most intimate details of who you are--your biological footprint--uploaded into a government database? What recourse do you have when that information, taken against your will, is shared, stolen, sold or compromised, as it inevitably will be in this age of hackers?
What happens when your DNA profile is compromised? And how do you defend yourself against charges of criminal wrongdoing in the face of erroneous technological evidence--DNA, biometrics, etc., are not infallible--that place you at the scene of a crime you didn't commit?
These are just a few of the questions we should be asking before these technologies and programs become too entrenched and irreversible.
While the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent government officials from searching an individual's person or property without a warrant and probable cause--evidence that some kind of criminal activity was afoot--the founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy on a cellular level. Yet that's exactly what we are lacking.
Once again, technology has outdistanced both our understanding of it and our ability to adequately manage the consequences of unleashing it on an unsuspecting populace. In the end, what all of this amounts to is a carefully crafted campaign designed to give the government access to and control over what it really wants: you.
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