Almost every move you make is being watched - and privacy is fast becoming obsolete. 2007 has seen the total acceptance of such surveillance mechanisms, and authorities are only at the start of their quest for the Holy Grail: a new wave of technology is there to record more. The cameras will soon be on, everywhere, all the time. Welcome to Big Brother.

If Hollywood and its movies are America thinking aloud, then a very interesting thought bubble has just appeared over the map of the United States. The bubble appears in the form of a film, "Look". It weaves a range of stories with entwining themes of sex, blackmail, crime and alienation, with a twist: every scene of the film is shot from the perspective of a surveillance camera, from the bubble lens above an ATM, to the elevated perspective of the security cameras that are ubiquitous and sometimes invisible, across the US.
The film underlines that the US, like so many other western countries, has taken fear as a guiding principle, and used it to introduce or justify wide-ranging security and surveillance programs as a means of preventing terrorist attacks such as those in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, in Bali in October 2002, and London in July 2005.
In the US, the focus has been on preventing another attack, and protecting the "homeland". It was the justification for the invasion of Iraq, and for the process known as "data-mining" where tens of millions of phone call records are scoured, and billions of calls and emails are monitored.
On a localised level, there is what Yvonne Cager, a video surveillance marketing manager at Texas Instruments, called the "drive to have more eyes everywhere". An IBM report in 2006 estimated there were 26 million surveillance cameras in the US, while the iSuppli research company forecasts that international sales of surveillance systems will more than double to 66 million units by 2011.

One of these cameras caught Look's director, Adam Rifkin, singing along to a song in his car as he passed through an intersection, triggering a red light camera. The image Rifkin saw with the fine that arrived in the mail a week or so later was astonishingly sharp and unflattering.
"I felt violated," he says, "but also inspired." Rifkin began looking for surveillance cameras, and the laws that govern their use. The cameras were everywhere and saw everyone. By Rifkin's assessment, the average American could expect to be filmed 200 times a day. The laws governing that coverage were surprisingly lax. "In 37 states it's legal for hidden cameras to be in dressing rooms and bathrooms," Rifkin says. "I wanted to throw a bucket of cold water onto the public's obliviousness about these cameras."

In the era of computer-controlled surveillance, your every move could be captured by cameras, whether you're shopping in the grocery store or driving on the freeway.
Proponents say it will keep us safe, but at what cost?
An ABC News/Washington Post poll in July 2007 found that 71 percent of Americans favour increased video surveillance. What people may not realize, however, is that advanced monitoring systems are proliferating around their country. High-profile national security efforts make the news - wiretapping phone conversations, Internet monitoring - but state-of-the-art surveillance is increasingly being used in more every-day settings, by local police and businesses, in banks, schools and stores. There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, almost everywhere.

We have arrived at a unique moment in the history of surveillance. The price of both megapixels and gigabytes has plummeted, making it possible to collect a previously unimaginable quantity and quality of data. Advances in processing power and software, meanwhile, are beginning to allow computers to surmount the greatest limitation of traditional surveillance - the ability of eyeballs to effectively observe the activity on dozens of video screens simultaneously. Computers can't do all the work by themselves, but they can expand the capabilities of humans exponentially.

Security expert Bruce Schneier says that it is naive to think that we can stop these technological advances, especially as they become more affordable and are hard-wired into everyday businesses.
But it is also reckless to let the advances proceed without a discussion of safeguards against privacy abuses. "Society is fundamentally changing and we aren't having a conversation about it," Schneier says. "We are entering the era of wholesale surveillance."
Meanwhile, Congress has not been updated since civil liberties concerns delayed satellite spying.

A plan to dramatically widen US law enforcement agencies' access to data from powerful spy satellites is moving toward implementation, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff expects to finalize a charter for the program.
Chertoff insists the scheme to turn spy satellites - that were originally designed for foreign surveillance - on Americans is legal, although a House committee that would approve the program has not been updated on the program for three months.
"We still haven't seen the legal framework we requested or the standard operation procedures on how the NAO will actually be run," House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie G. Thompson told the Wall Street Journal. Thompson was referring to the National Applications Office - a new DHS subset that would coordinate access to spy-satellite data for non-military domestic agencies, including law enforcement.

Civil liberties concerns delayed the program after lawmakers and outside activists wondered how the program would be structured to protect Americans from unconstitutional surveillance from the powerful satellites, which can see through cloud cover, trees and even concrete buildings.
The program's charter remains unfinalized, but Chertoff said it will use clear language to explain legal restrictions on the data's use. Warrants will be obtained when required before collecting satellite intelligence, and the program won't use technology to intercept verbal communications, according to the Journal.
"One lesson I've learned is it's not enough to say we know what we're doing is going to be OK," Chertoff told the paper. "We've got to really make it clear to the public that we're doing this, but we're not doing that."

But it is not the end. New technology may allow long-range iris scans. Fingerprints, iris scans and even details of the way people walk, their scars and the size and shape of their ear lobes will be collected. And the FBI is going to collect biometric information on foreign visitors to the US, for we all "know" that foreigners will try and destroy America - not?
And therefore, to keep Americans "safe" from foreigners, the American tax payer will have to cough up for the new billion dollar database.
Researchers at West Virginia University are working on technology for the FBI that will let them capture images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards, without them even knowing. More than 900,000 American police and law enforcement officials will be able to access the data.
Unremarkably, civil liberties campaigners criticised the plans. Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union said: "It's enabling the always-on surveillance society." But the truth of the matter is, that the camera is already on, all the time.