Manapalan Florida, population 321, is going to install street cameras to photograph the vehicles and automatically check the identity of everyone who passes through.

New technology will soon track drivers who pass by the waterfront mansions of this ritzy oceanside town, checking their backgrounds to find wanted criminals and following up on those who are nearby when a crime occurs.

The article isn't explicit on this point but it sounds like the digitized images of each vehicle will be fed into optical character recognition software that will automatically extract license plate numbers. Then the license plate numbers will be automatically compared against both stolen car lists and lists of car owners who have outstanding warrants for their arrest.

It is a bit of a stretch to call the government of a town of only 321 people by the term "Big Brother".

"Big Brother is watching you," said Town Commissioner Peter Blum last week after commissioners approved spending up to $60,000 on the system.

"Or, Little Brother, in this case," said Commissioner Tom Gerrard, a retired telecommunications executive who is helping guide the town's foray into high-tech crime solving.

Think about the next step beyond stationary cameras and automatic character recognition. TV shows like COPS routinely broadcast video from cameras mounted in police cars during chases or during interactions of officers with occupants of cars pulled over on the side of the road. One next logical step would be to combine those cameras automated optical character recognition software mounted on police cars. But whether or not it is possible today it certainly will be in the future. A police car could have software that automatically notifies police officers when either a stolen vehicle or a vehicle of a wanted suspect was behind or in front or just passed by the squad car.

This idea could be extended much further to empower private citizens. Anyone willing to pay for the costs of a cellular data network connection to their car (and the costs of such networks can be expected to drop by orders of magnitude in coming years even while their speeds increase) could feed a stream of license place numbers and the car's current GPS-derived location to local police. Then a police computer could also do checks for stolen cars and wanted suspects.

Cameras could also provide feeds into facial recognition software to identify pedestrians. Existing facial recognition systems tested at airports are probably accurate enough to be useful in conditions where a few percent rate of false positives is tolerable but the error rate still limits its use in many potential applications. Recent work done a SUNY Stony Brook may provide one of the breakthroughs needed for the creation of much more accurate facial recognition software.

Science fiction writer David Brin described the future of ubiquitous surveillance and what it means for free societies in his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. You can also find out more about his views on this subject at this page on his web site.