Comment by jordanb

There was a time when police were banned from putting a tracker on people's cars without a court order.

The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.

In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.

Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.

Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.