Yeah. When I went to the last taxpayers march on Washington this past fall, I got a video ticket coming home through Maryland.
Many citizens let these video speed enforcement setups stay because “it is for public safety” (never mind those who promote them are doing so primarily for revenue purposes)
Once you let that camel’s nose into the tent, the rest of the camel is not far behind.
Just look at every single intersection you go through nowadays. There are those little cameras on nearly every single one of them. Overpasses, buildings, etc. Those things are EVERYWHERE, even in places where they are most definitely NOT used for traffic enforcement purposes.
How much of a stretch of the imagination is it to ponder the following:
There is a database of plate numbers entered by federal/state/local governments that are being tracked for whatever reason. (Could be fugitives, people wanted for questioning, terrorists, whatever) As cars go through the intersection, the cameras extract each plate number and send it to a central location, where the very first thing that is done is to match against the database of watched licenses and look for a match. If a match is found, some process is kicked off such as dispatching law enforcement personnel to intercept the vehicle.
Of course, if there is no match, then the plate number is discarded. But what if the people who maintain and use the system say “we will keep 24 hours worth of plate numbers that pass through each location” or some such thing for what they deem a valid purpose? What is to stop them, given the ubiquity and affordability of storage and fast databases, to simply store this stuff for longer periods of time?
All I have described above is not only technologically do-able, but is being done at some level and has been for some time.
As we speak, this is very likely already being done for what are termed “valid reasons”. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to readily recognize that “valid reasons” is a very fluid term, open to definition and re-definition.