[giardini]

And now we find that the gummint is gathering information from all sorts of corporations. It's as if the ACLU's nightmare overview surveillance system was used as a blueprint by the government to design PRISM et al.

So your credit card, supermarket, gas card, library card, debit card, pharmacy card, prescriptions, public records (home and auto ownership, license tags, taxes, school records, etc.) are all Hoovered (as in "J. Edgar Hoover") up and ready for analysis. This is tied into your state's automobile licensing system: police cars have scanners that incessantly search for all license plates in the visible roadway and, for each, perform an automated search for outstanding warrants and criminal history in the state's database.

And if the driver is good-looking and has a clean record, the officer can _still_ force a search of state records to retrieve addresses, phone numbers, etc. so he can stop her, talk to her and then optionally, hit on her later at his convenience ("What a small world, what are the odds of us meeting again! Must be fate.").

[btilly]

You remind me of a true story from the 1990s. Woman, on her way back from Canada, is pulled over in NY for speeding. She's got a plate of home-made cookies in the seat next to her and offers the officer one.

About 200 miles later, not speeding, she's pulled over again. As the officer approaches she says, "What did I do wrong?" He replies, "Nothing, but I heard that you've got the most amazing cookies!"