Surveillance Nation, Part Two

"Similar logic applies to the fear that data collected for one purpose will be misused for another. Consider, for example, the program in London, England, that levies a £5 ($8) 'congestion charge' on each vehicle crossing into the central city. To enforce collection, the city uses hundreds of digital video cameras and character recognition software to read the license plate of every vehicle crossing into the fee area. Plate numbers are matched against the list of drivers who have paid up; noncompliant vehicle owners receive summonses in the mail. Just before the program’s launch, newspapers revealed that the images would be given to police and military databases, which will use face recognition software to scan for criminals and terrorists—an example of what privacy activists decry as 'feature creep.'.. The technology to provide such protections is already emerging. The Malaysian government is rolling out a multifunction smart card with 32 kilobytes of memory that can store up to seven types of data, including details about a person's identity, driver's license, bank account, and immigration status."