As an avid science fiction fan the major part of my life, so many of those stories read over the years already have or are now coming to pass. Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, and the rest really were prophets.

Oh hell. I've been in their database since the 60's, finger prints and all. Unless you are doing something really bad, like a DUI or murder, they probably won't even look sideways at you. At an Oak Ridge Nuke Plant protest I screamed my soc sec # repeatedly at the cops, the marshalls, and the security guys...nada. The FBI don't much care unless you really do something stupid...like hide their guns.

Blow your mind with Taylor Caldwell's "Devil's Advocate"... the prophecy from her 1952 book is astonishing. Like city cops paid off duty to do the bidding of big corps. READ IT

Remember when these kind of draconian measures were instituted by the Worst President Ever after 9/11 and our privacy and civil rights were imperiled? Also, when idiots who looked at this growing surveillance state as a good thing said it kept us "safe from the terrorists"? They were the kind of folks who said that "If you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about." I don't trust ANY government agency to respect my privacy and civil rights, not even Obama's gutless "Justice" Department. This the foundation of fascism, the system of social control and intimidation that the ruling class feels is necessary to keep the rabble in line. Maybe we will never have anything as overt as the telescreen in "1984" but this is another step in that direction. I don't even recognize this country any longer. How quickly we forget that a Republican president, Eisenhower, who warned us about the deleterious effects of the MIC would have decried this development.

Yep. I was on about this several months back and there were few if any comments. Prog-populists and Dim lite faux populists alike are DANGEROUSLY, CRAVENLY WEAK on high-tech full frontal assaults on civil liberties at every level of our society (local, State & Federal).

According to information leaked in Congress during the Bush-Cheney Junta, fully 70% of our "intelligence gathering" in this country is now corporately privatized. This information is both shared and sold among private/government hybrid entities to unknown degrees. We know not who all will end up with details of our identity down to our individual DNA structure.

There is the FBI/corporate direct "anti-terrorist" interface INFRAGARD (perfect for company blacklisting of ANY dissenters on a massive, detailed and unprecedented scale). All these DHS/FBI/ICE/NORTHCOM/militarized CIA etc., agencies and the privatized intell companies (over 1900 according to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post in PBS Frontline's documentary Top Secret America) are working towards data sharing interoperability from the federal agency chiefs down to the local police. This smooth hierarchy of police state structure and communications is, at its core, structurally identical to the Nazi unification of police powers from the national Schutzstaffel (SS), to the Gestapo (local political police who reported in their chain of command all the way to the top in many cases) to the Grun-polizei (Green Police) who seeded communities with bribed or threatened informants to turn in "untermenschen" (sub-humans) designated by the Nazi Party as racial or political undesirables.

The real impetus towards a unified Federal, State & local police command & control and information interoperability hierarchy began under George Herbert Walker Bush with the meetings on this subject held in San Luis Obispo. Now it is being compounded into hard-shell fascism by the addition to this hierarchy of NorthCom and the General Petraeus militarized CIA (which would've once violated Posse Comitatus had it not already gone the way of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights except for the 2nd Amendment -- so far).

Our State Department is becoming heavily militarized with large mercenary support armies in Iraq now on the foreign policy side of things. Diplomacy among neo-lib/neo-con Democrats and Republicans has become a "quaint" relic of the past.

Now it's just war, un-Constitutional legalistic persecution and vicious top-down class war against everyone and any civil organization who dares to meaningfully impact the corporatist, militarist bottom lines. The only remedy to this is NUMBERS, ORGANIZATION AND DETERMINED COMMITMENT.

If the existing system isn't working for you, your family or community, join and build the nearest Occupy Together movement to you. If you can't find a job, find an OCCUPATION.

Why? What can they do?

There is a strong stream of support within the movement for building the type of society we want to inhabit from the occupation parks outward to extend to more and more local and regional self-sufficiency/community resiliency support systems.

There are many hurdles to this, but many exciting possibilities as well. We are educating ourselves as to the types of economic models (co-operative, parecon, Mondragon, etc.) that we can develop in our regions to create a parallel economic system, general assembly system, cooperative banking system, a requirement for State-owned infrastructure/co-op start-up/entreprenurial start-up banks in all 50 States working in tandem with a national infrastructure bank, multi-media/journalism environment, educational system, legal aid, medical aid, etc., that serves our working-class, working-poor, under-employed or unemployed needs -- because the established corporatist, militarist, neo-liberal capitalist system increasingly exclusively serves only plutocrats and their upper-middle-class errand boys & girls and applies an entirely separate, protectively insular, upscale "rule of law" to these elites at the expense of the common good, public institutions and public spaces.

The OWS/Occupy Together movements are people's movements who want to be inclusive of everyone alienated, used, maimed, killed, bankrupted, rendered homeless, subjected to illegal foreclosures, lack of adequate or timely health care, sub-standard education, lack of employment opportunity or otherwise betrayed by neo-liberal/neo-conservative capitalism and its increasingly anti-democratic and un-Constitutional police powers.

"IAFIS is already the largest biometric database in the world—it includes 70 million subjects in the criminal master file."

70 million criminals? Seems like an awful lot.

Doesn't matter if this giant new system is useful or reliable, or necessary, or fair, or too massive to manage, or if it duplicates what already exists. This is a game by a bunch of smart alec stupid boys to give out very expensive techie contracts and ignore common sense methods to fight whatever the hell they say their target is.

It also adds another level of intimidation from Big Brother, which is now a cozy alliance between police, CIA, FBI, and the private sector security firms and employers. Want that job? Better not find a picture of your face at a union meeting, protest, or peace demonstration. Better not find a picture of someone who looks like you either.

Would it not be so much easier to find Wall Street criminals sitting in their offices and pull them in ? We already know who they are, what they have done, and where they live.

I think the most important part of this article is the concluding paragraphs, when the threat to civil liberties posed by "false positive" computerized facial recognition comes into play. As the author notes, the more faces there are in the digital database, the greater the probability that the system (no matter how sophisticated) will regularly misidentify people.

Where this techology is headed runs parallel to the DNA databases and fingerprint databases that police agencies already use widely. Imagine surveillance footage of an actual crime scene - like those grainy photos of the hooded perps sticking up the convenience store and fleeing out the door that you can see on cable tv shows every night. We've got a crime, perhaps a horrible one. We got no named suspects. All we got is some footage of the perpetrator's face.

Not too far down the road to the brave new world future, an IAFIS check is run, which compares the face from the convenience store stick up to all the millions of faces in the database. 99.9% are excluded by the facial recognition software. But one, or two, or a half dozen, or a dozen, or maybe a hundred faces in the mass national database are separated out. They come back to the investigating police agency, pre-screened as close enough to being a match that follow up inquiry might be worthwhile.

If yesterday some armed robber who does, by sheer coincidence, have a striking resemblance to you stuck up a convenience store a thousand miles away, as an innocent citizen what do you have to fear if the police knock on your door and ask you where you were yesterday at the moment of the crime? If you lead a "typical" middle class American lifestyle, most likely no big sweat. I can remember where I was yesterday at this particular time, probably recall who could vouch for my whereabouts here rather than a thousand miles away, and perhaps even retrieve some corroborating documentation (records from work, debit card receipts, cell phone records, whatever). That's how a simple alibi is corroborated.

However, this can be a very big sweat indeed if the convenience store stick up was local, or if the precise time of the crime was uncertain, or if the event under investigation happened days, or weeks, or months earlier, or if you do not live a "typical" routinized, documented lifestyle. How does the recluse prove he or she was home alone? How does the homeless vagabond pinpoint his or her precise whereabouts on Tuesday evening at 7:34 pm two weeks ago?

It is superficially easy to proclaim that false positive identification presents no threat to your civil rights or privacy if you are an innocent, law abiding citizen with nothing to hide. It is easy, but also very, very reckless to make that broad assertion. Particularly if the crime under investigation is a heinous one and the eyewitness identification evidence is ambiguous, the dangers of false positive identification are magnified.

Actually proving "it wasn't me, I wasn't there" is sometimes flat out impossible. If you have the misfortune of being on the receiving end of a criminal charge, it is invariably a horrendously risky and potentially expensive process. Expansion of this law enforcement facial recognition database enhances the risks mistaken identification greatly.

Bill from Saginaw

With the declared objective of protecting the USA from all enemies external or internal, the gov agencies are now committed to protecting the status quo and incumbent ruling classes from all change and possibility of change. Biometrics are just one of the many technologies that are part of a vast legal and enforcement framework dedicated to one single outcome: Snuffing out all resistance. If you disagree with the powers that be, they can hunt u down and kill u, and they get medals for it.

What's bizarre about reading this is I'd rather have a better ID system in airports as they're describing than the disgusting monster X-ray machine that's just a profit motive for corporate/political buddies. I saw an article about our soldiers using a portable devise in the field that can read and store iris patterns for identifying the local population for elections to tamp down on possible voter fraud. Easier, more efficient, and safer ways to search/confirm people at airports could be utilized here, but is not.