tom_thinks

Check out thisnytimes article

Visitors arriving at checkpoints, including those at the Mexican and Canadian borders, will face "real-time identification" — instantaneous authentication to confirm that they are who they say they are. American officials will, at least in theory, be able to track them inside the United States and determine if they leave the country on time.
Officials say they will be able, for instance, to determine whether a visitor who overstays a visa has come in contact with the police, but privacy advocates say they worry that the new system could give the federal government far broader power to monitor the whereabouts of visitors by tapping into credit card information or similar databases. The system would tie together about 20 federal databases with information on the more than 300 million foreign visitors each year.

Why worry about that?

Whoever wins the contract will be asked to develop a standard for identifying visitors using a variety of possible tools — from photographs and fingerprints, already used at some airports on a limited basis since January, to techniques like iris scanning, facial recognition and radio-frequency chips for reading passports or identifying vehicles.

How long will it be until these types of measures are used on American citizens? Another terrorist attack might speed up the timeline and of course having Bush in the white house another four years seems likely to accelerate the process. Once again it seems that us 'freedom-loving' people in the United States are willing to put aside those freedoms in hopes that the 'freedom-haters' will be prevented from hurting us. The government is investing billions of dollars in programs like this one, the MATRIX and Capps II, but still seems to be ignoring the root causes of terrorism (global poverty, imperial invasions, growing disparity between rich and poor, dependance on oil, incredibly lopsided consumption of resources, etc). It seems like they're saying, "It's ok that there are all these problems that cause people to hate us, because we'll be able to watch, catch and kill all the terrorists by spying on everyone with our awesome computers and bombing the countries with people who might become terrorists." If this bugs you out visit aclu.org to see what you can do about it.