Public Surveillance

Power to the people. We can spy too, and perhaps will become the spying apparatus of the future, efficiently and cheaply collecting information, pictures, and conversations on fellow citizens and reselling it to corporations and governments.

Why have privacy or any semblance of a society when you could have beer money in exchange for collectively destroying civilization?

But then there are benefits too. Nothing is ever too one sided. The weapons government uses against citizens eventually become used by citizens against government, offering some slight defense and means of empowerment by which to fight back.

In many places, police cars are outfitted with license plate readers that scan all passing plates. This has the side effect of tracking private travel.

As technology like rear view cameras become mainstream in consumer grade vehicles, license plate scanners could as well. This would allow citizens to spy on other citizens to share that information with companies and authorities, but more importantly could detect and track police cars, including unmarked police vehicles that had ever been at least once witnessed using police lights by any citizen.

Using networked traffic applications like Waze allows police cars to not only be tracked, but indexed and shared, even notifying all citizens with a particular radius or trajectory of a police vehicle.

There would no longer be a need to look around for hidden cop cars or have uncertainty when being followed by a driver behaving strangely. You'd be free again to drive without predation.