Wouldn't it be something as simple as a continuous recording, uploaded to NSA/gov servers where they would then run basic facial recognition, tag each face, index them and compare them for matches in the database. Then you could track where an individual has been over time.
The product may be publicly available, but the difference here is that the government is secretly installing cameras in every major public location, and building a growing database of every individual's face and movements. No individual company could do that. The government can.
the government is secretly installing cameras in every major public location, and building a growing database of every individual's face and movements
Is there any proof of this actually happening? I mean not "there's a system that does video surveillance, so they must be spying on everybody", but actual proof that there exists the database that includes every individual's face and movements and that police is installing cameras in every major public location to maintain this database (as opposed to, you know, legitimate purposes of securing major public locations).
The high profile ex-NSA whistleblowers in the press right now are making plenty of statements about these new systems.
I don't recall anything about video surveillance specifically, but what they are concerned about is the database of dossiers on everyone that includes all of the multimedia information available. They have internet traffic, email, cell information (movements) but I don't know what else is collected.
Maybe someone who's done more reading on the subject can pipe up.
Isn't internet traffic a non secret now after the warrantless spying program fiasco that whistleblower Diane Roark allegedly leaked? And if you have cell phone information you have movement information, I haven't heard anything specifically about movement other than that.
The first link has a lot of things but I think main content is distilled here:
http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/
Where Binney says that NSA has capability to intercept electronic communications and he suspects it is doing so without privacy guards. He however does not say anything about existence of personal dossiers on every US citizen. He also makes some estimates of new (not yet existing) NSA data storage capacity, and deduces this amount of storage may only be needed if NSA plans to capture and store all traffic without filtering. However, this system does not actually exist as of yet, and his estimates are based on "some reports" and are hard to verify. While of course extreme suspicion may be prudent in every case where a lot of taxpayer dollars is spent on building new surveillance infrastructure by an agency that has had proven its disregard for privacy, it alone does not prove current existence of the program as described above.
The second link describes the program which was explicitly made to exclude US citizens, but after 9/11 they used also data on US citizens provided by telecoms, such as AT&T - namely billing data (i.e. who talked to whom). I see no mention on them having access to location data or internet traffic, or them doing it for every US citizen. Binney was understandably outraged about warrantless surveillance on US citizens and had quit, however he neither proves not implies there's a systematic program of the extent mentioned above (i.e. personal dossier on communications, location, etc. of every person in US), unless I have missed something there.
The product may be publicly available, but the difference here is that the government is secretly installing cameras in every major public location, and building a growing database of every individual's face and movements. No individual company could do that. The government can.