Noah Shachtman details the Pentagon's plans for a surveillance system that can track every vehicle within an urban combat zone and examines the possibilities that the same system could be used for domestic surveillance.
The Pentagon is developing a surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyse the movement of every vehicle in a city. But police, scientists and privacy experts all agree that the technology, which is neither classified nor legally limited to military use, could easily be adapted for domestic law enforcement and surveillance.
A surveillance camera that can track and analyze the movement of individual vehicles in a crowded city is being developed for the Pentagon. Despite assurances that the camera is meant only to protect troops in the field, civilian authorities will probably want to use it, too.