From Slashdot comes the article

From Slashdot comes the article in the LA Times about how the Tampa police scanned the faces of SuperBowl-goers to see if they matched against images of known felons.

As you can expect, there is the usual hand-wringing and hyperbole on Slashdot. Since even fingerprinting is inaccurate, how can we trust this? How do we know the false positive rates? After the cops use it, who gets it?

I personally think this is a great idea, with the caveat [And there’s always a caveat, kids] that this type of surveillance be made available to everyone. Now that I think of it, it is available to everyone who can afford it. So take up a community collection and invest in some video cameras, folks! Stake out the mayor’s house, videotaping his every coming and going, and turn it into a public-access TV show. Bug your city councilperson’s phones, plant cameras in their toilets, and run streaming live webcams on a server hosted in a non-extradition-treaty country! Hey, public servants don’t have anything to hide —at least, they’d better not.

I can hear the rallying cry of the twenty-first century: Open-Source the Government!