[citation][nom]ravenware[/nom]He is referring to a government/corporate agenda, by way of tricking people into thinking the either this kind of surveillance doesn't occur or that it some how couldn't or wouldn't occur.[/citation]
Oh, don't get me wrong. I totally think it could occur. And, as I indicate at the article's conclusion, there are organizations that do have the ability to track people through their license plates. (Good to know about the New York police, by the way, azgard.) But as I also said, it's one thing to track license plates and it's another to track faces. My point is that today's state of the art is unable to perform suitable facial recognition at a distance, and even if it could, it seems unlikely that our government's systems are integrated well enough to allow for seamless cross-agency tracking.
I'm not out to "trick" anybody. I've always had a deep distrust of authority, and I'm no fan of the way our privacy is eroding on a daily basis. But at the same time, I'm not going to assume that Big Brother has powers of omniscience that don't exist (yet) without some credible proof. Fact: The U.S. government buys surveillance technology from the private sector. Fact: MotionDSP makes some of if not the best video enhancement technology in the world. Fact: I proved first-hand that conventional video surveillance clips are not sufficient to enable facial recognition and thus tracking under everyday circumstances, much as Hollywood might indicate the contrary. And I'm pretty sure that MotionDSP would have loved to showcase better results on Tom's had it been able to.
Could all of this change with a technology shift next year or even tomorrow? You bet. If it does, I sure hope to be able to write about it. Until then, I'm not going to panic, succumb to paranoia, or give authorities reason to want to track me in the first place.