If you're an American citizen (or resident) looking for a single sentence to summarize your relationship with the government, here's one possibility: “The government gets to spy on you and know your whereabouts at all times, whereas you aren't even allowed to know where to find the nearest police officer nearest you.”
That's the simplest conclusion to reach after looking at two different and theoretically unrelated news stories from this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Justice Department, primarily the Drug Enforcement Administration, “has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.”
Not that this should surprise anyone who pays attention. Last May, when we reported how “license plate scanner errors vex innocent motorists,” we pointed out that if you live in modern America, there's a good chance that anytime you leave your house, your movements and whereabouts are being recorded in real-time and stored in a permanent record accessible to anybody willing to pay for database access (or skilled enough to hack into it). MORE