== America, The Sexy Fascist State = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Surveillance cameras are booming. The question is, do they make your butt look big?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/08/24/notes082407.DTL&nl=fix

I like to picture it, if I have to picture it at all, as some sort of giant, low-lit converted warehouse, loosely staffed with a haphazard gaggle of scraggy, perpetually hung-over former frat guys and ex-cops and disgruntled former bank tellers all staring numbly at banks of 10-year-old black-and-white Dell monitors set about in a scattershot array of worn gray cubicles, all smelling of stale coffee and overloaded electrical outlets and tiny lost dreams.

They are wary, these government workers, these data miners. They are jaded, burned out, sighing heavily. After all, they know it's all some big in-joke, this supposedly ominous government surveillance thing, all the cameras and the wiretapping and the Internet scouring. I mean, isn't it?

And the joke only got worse when they were all hired en masse by a nebulous substrata of the sprawling and highly ineffective Department of Homeland Security to somehow sift through 10,000 hours of random urban surveillance-camera footage every week and 2 million Web site histories and countless witless phone conversations all of people chatting annoyingly about, you know, work, and relationships, and how tired they are, and how drunk they got last night, and nothing much at all, right alongside endless digital video of citizens walking around picking their noses and scratching their butts and looking confused and happy and miserable and lost and found and occasionally smoking a joint or buying porn or stealing a pack of gum or parallel parking very, very poorly. Fun!

Is this accurate? A likely scenario? Well, maybe. One thing we can be relatively sure of: It doesn't look anything like the edgy high-tech surveillance rooms in, say, "24," or "Las Vegas," or even "Minority Report," all packed with savvy, sexy, hyper-intelligent hipster dudes and sleek geeky babes all scouring gorgeous hi-def TVs and using top-secret NASA technology to zoom in on individual faces and retinas and fingerprints and hair follicles of just about anyone at all, on the fly, in a matter of seconds, always catching their swarthy criminal by episode's end. Would that we were so savvy. And cool. And effective. And interesting. And smart. ...

[Hydra]

1. This makes me laugh

too bad it isn't the truth :rofl: