Terrorist Watch List

Today, Counterpunch carries the quite stunning news that the US terrorism watch list now contains 1 million people.

1 million people!

The list includes such luminaries as the ex-assistant US Attorney. That's right - the terrorist watch list is now so large, it's starting to assimilate the higher parts of the US governement itself. As The Matrix's Morpheus might have said: clearly, police states are not without a sense of irony.

Those in Britain - now the country with the most closed-circuit TV cameras per capita of any country in the world, might want to stop giggling at this point. As has been very astutely pointed out, once the camera apparatus is physically in place and face recognition software becomes robust enough (if it isn't already), following the movements of everyone at every moment simply becomes a problem of networking and processing power.