more watching

Have you heard of the Real I.D. Act. It will require that by 2008, everyone carry what will amount to a National I.D. card. This probably explains all the furor over illegal (and hence, undocumented) immigrants. If you'd like to spend some time, you can read this Acrobat summary of it.

The card will contain personal information in a machine readable form. Yes, in other words, whenever you are conducting some government business, you'll have to swipe your card to identify yourself. But what about private business? Well, gee, I guess they'll have access to that information, too. (I'm sure they wont do anything illegal, unethical, or profit-making with your information, though)
Eventually, you can bet, the Government (in it's current paranoid form, at any rate) will want RFID chips rather than mere magnetic strips. The advantage (from a "security" stand-point) of RFID is that the card wont have to be run through a machine to be read, but can be activated remotely, as you enter a courthouse, or perhaps as you walk past a street cam.

But, you know, maybe I'm worrying over nothing. Britian already has a massive surveillance system in place, with face recognition software and everything. And they seem to be okay, right. I mean, a place that the book "V for Vendetta" was set in (under a dark, religiously fascist regime) cant be completely unaware of government shennanigans (a British word, even). So lets think of the U.K. as a kind of canary in the data mine.

Oh, and go get a camera phone. You know, just in case you need to take a picture of something.