Diegetics

Disguise them as self-service photo booths......

That way they will be more acceptable by the subject population and they will pay for themselves......

500,000 channels and still nothing to watch.

A few more, and they could rival London!

Too bad they won't be tendering offers from Western contractors, otherwise I'd like to get in on this. Automated surveillance and image recognition is something that would be very easy to get grant funding for. Not my research area, but I am a pretty competent programmer and could easily dive into this sort of thing. We'll probably be seeing this sort of thing in the US soon. If Alph's theories about government growth prove to be correct, and we do indeed move into what he terms the "empire" phase of history, it shouldn't be long now.

I actually have some legitimate ideas for this sort of pervasive surveillance technology, too... They could make shopping extremely convenient, for example.

The technology is not there right now but it's getting close. I think it's definitely something that will be doable within the next decade. Misidentification can probably be brought to tolerably low levels. For added validation, a rewards card swiped somewhere near the entrance or even during a checkout phase would allow the system to match up a customer with an identity. Even a limited checkout like this would greatly enhance the shopping experience because the system would already know what you've grabbed, so no need to scan and bag everything.

I've been using debit cards almost exclusively for the past four years. I rarely have cash on me. The facial recognition thing is the next logical step for me. Then I don't have to carry anything at all

Sleight of hand and privacy issues in this case are 100% irrelevant. Think about it: how is my proposal, once a card swipe is included at the end, any different than self-checkout? It's not. With club cards, stores can already track your purchases, and the weight sensor is not all that secure of a loss prevention mechanism. Systems such as the ones I propose would be gradually phased in along existing self-checkout kiosks.

If only I had some time and people to develop a prototype with...

That about sums it up Tinker. Resistance is futile but not impossible. Kids growing up in new electronics systems will learn to game it.

How do we know the NSA has that info? If they did, the US would have been able to move more swiftly to pursue Wikileaks and their supporters. The NSA could have a good deal of raw data but they are not omniscient. It is probably still very easy to slip under their radar, particularly if they don't know what they're looking for. Total end-to-end encryption would completely defeat them. If only more people took this seriously, it could find its way into future internet protocols, although perhaps governments would then try to mandate that they remain unencrypted (but good luck depriving users of that choice).