> Conversely, what would happen if someone took pictures of cars going in / out of NSA/CIA/FBI facilities on a regular basis and posted them online?

I would imagine that person's life would be made very difficult. Even outside of these lettered agencies, I would imagine if someone created a system to capture the license plates of the cars used privately and publicly by government members or high ranking executives in organisations tied to the government they would create a very bad situation for themselves.

If anything has been made more than blatantly apparent in recent years it is that there are one set of rules for us and another for them.

It will be an interesting future when the average person can anonymously set up a device to do these things without further human intervention at low cost.

I'd imagine that such a future also means that a lot of the devices capable of what you say would be made "illegal" by virtue of countless regulations, requiring of licenses and approvals, and even grey-areas that make it a nightmare for private individuals to pursue, etc. I phrase it like that, because all of these things (though some may be noble/necessary/etc) do effectively make things "illegal".

You can essentially already do this with a Raspberry Pi, PiCam, battery pack and opencv. The hardware will cost you under $100, and there are already various libraries that can process the license plates [0]. With a 3g stick you could even collect this data remotely.

Of course, performance won't be comparable to the commercial product here in question, but I'm certain that with some motivation you can get similar, if not better, results on better hardware.

[0] https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

With systems like this in place do you really believe anonymity is even an achievable goal?

It's a good point. At the end of the day, anything you do in this universe is observable :)

The government isn't a private citizen and is precluded from doing things, like keeping dossiers on non-suspects. But apparently the courts, which only respond to complaints by directly effected parties (which the litmus test for is preposterous), have made it ok to circumvent the spirit of the constitution by outsourcing surveillance. I would argue that if the government is precluded from doing something, of course they would still be precluded from doing the same action by proxy. We are, and so should they be.

And your second question, I would assume you would end up in jail for illegally monitoring government security employees.

This is a private database. The article speculates that it's owned by Vigilant Solutions.

Is there a word for government and corporations weaving themselves together?

Yes, it's typically a hallmark of fascism (seriously, look it up).

World War I is still playing out.

http://mises.org/library/war-collectivism-world-war-i

(I don't really mean to endorse that article, but I do think it looks at the world through an interesting lens. WWI probably does represent some sort of transition point in history, where the idea of an actual global empire became realizable and we are still in the period of developing a global governance structure to deal with it. Maybe such a structure is not inevitable, but I think it is quite likely.)

And socialism would be the government owning the corporation..

Yes, "fascism" is the technical term, but also the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower was prescient about.

Which was almost "military-industrial-congressional complex" but was edited for political reasons.

Cite? First time I've heard this.

Hm, this is more controversial than I thought. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

The phrase was thought to have been "war-based" industrial complex before becoming "military" in later drafts of Eisenhower's speech, a claim passed on only by oral history. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-12-10-eisenhower-ad...

Geoffrey Perret, in his biography of Eisenhower, claims that, in one draft of the speech, the phrase was "military–industrial–congressional complex", indicating the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry, but the word "congressional" was dropped from the final version to appease the then-currently elected officials. http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/guest-post-james-...

James Ledbetter calls this a "stubborn misconception" not supported by any evidence; likewise a claim by Douglas Brinkley that it was originally "military–industrial–scientific complex". http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2001/6/...

Additionally, Henry Giroux claims that it was originally "military–industrial–academic complex". http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?prod...

Fascism, Corporatocracy, Oligarchy are all technically valid terms.

However, Fascism is generally used because its scary and [frankly] that kind of Government/Megacorp relationship in general is scary.

> Is there a word for government and corporations weaving themselves together?

Several. The fact that the economic system of the early industrial period featured an arrangement of property rights which favored holders of capital (corporations exist only as ideas, but their owners are real beings) who then exerted disproportionate power over all institutions of society, including government, leaving those capitalists the dominant power in all domains of life is why critics of that early industrial economic system named it "capitalism", and the weaving together of corporate and government power driven by corporate influence over government remains a strong feature of capitalism. (Supporters of "capitalism" who have attempted to redefine "capitalism" to mean some ideal system of perfect market freedom rather than the actual system the term was coined to refer to often treat this as something other than capitalism, or as a failed form "crony capitalism".)

More formal integration of government, industry, and organized labor is corporatism, top-down forms dictated by the central government of corporatism were features of Italian fascism and many authoritarian movements of roughly the same time. This has sometimes led to the equation of corporatism with authoritarianism/fascism, though this is an error: corporatism is substantially older, and has substantially broader reach -- it is no more equivalent to fascism than anti-communism (also a feature of fascism) is.

And, despite the rhetorical differences in how the integration works, such integration is also a feature of those Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist Communist regimes that either don't go so far as to completely eliminate private industry, or which back off from it.

Which, taken together, illustrates the reason why there isn't a term in general use for corporations (which are, after all, creatures of government) and government weaving themselves together -- its a feature of every economic system that has actually practiced in which corporations exist, from capitalism to the various reactions against liberal capitalism.

Very interesting. This made me realize the outsourcing the extension of empire power via the East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company, etc. One could view corporations with a large enough <something> as a fifth branch of government.

Most of the other replies to your question have been with the answer "Fascism". However, as I discuss this sort of thing a lot both online/offline, I can tell you that a lot of people think this is some sort of weird property of "capitalism".

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

- Benito Mussolini, 1935, "The Doctrine of Fascism," Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

People who are ignorant of history don't realize that Mussolini was trying to sell fascism (which invented a new, top-down version of corporatism) as equivalent to corporatism (which had been discussed for many years, and defined in the late 19th century in a more organic, bottom-up way which was not "the merger of state and corporate power" by a group convened under the auspices of the Pope) because corporatism was a well-established, at the time, element of Catholic social teaching and a popular idea, and he wanted to steal the label to reinforce the political appeal of Fascism.

so you're saying the current oligarchy of Bilderberg and Legatus attendees is somehow superior and less tyrrannical, and therefore different than Mussolini's vision, because there are more of them?

I'm not only not saying that, I'm at a loss to see how anything even vaguely similar to that could be inferred from what I actually said.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Most "capitalist" countries really have mixed economies, which are perfectly compatible with the tenets of Fascism.

It's called Fascism.

We may end up having Continuum-style Corporate Congress.

We call it the US Postal service.

The data in the database must largely be collected by public entities though, municipal and state street/traffic cameras, police cameras, etc.

Vigilant are not setting up their own cameras to collect this.

Untrue. I believe they lease equipment to repo-men, who get discounts (and possibly payments) based on the amount of plate data they feed back to Vigilant.

wonder how longer before that database is broken into.

I believe the fixed license plate readers are installed on public roadways.

License plate recognition capabilities are within the reach of decent programmers right now. I actually wrote such a thing on contract recently. The critical difference between me writing this kind of code and this initiative is the data mining. Government (with private mandate in this case) has huge capabilities to correlate data the individual does not have.

Yes, a private citizen couldn't do this, because a private citizen can only spend so much time and money taking pictures, storing them and providing database access.

If a group of private citizens were to pool their efforts, it would be conspiracy to break the law, just as if a group of private citizens or a corporation were to pool their efforts to displenish any other public resource like airwaves, water supply, clean water, quiet, clean air, etc.

Can you set up a distributed system, nationwide, to collect and correlate months of traffic patterns for 50% of the population?

A private citizen doesn't have the power to put you in jail.

A private citizen could take the photos and store them on a computer.

A private citizen could not easily run them against license plate databases at scale and resolve the identity of the car's owner to the name of a real person.

A private citizen could not then take that real person's name and run it against LE databases to determine whether the registered owner of the car were a known arsonist, terrorist suspect, felon, firearms owner, or campaign contributor to whomever.

If the battle is to be fought and won, I would be surprised if "taking pictures" were the act found to be unconstitutional. I would be slightly less surprised if "storing every bit of metadata possible on every human possible" were found to be unconstitutional, and that storage / reconciliation should likely be the targets of our efforts.