The surveillance society encroaches from all sides as new cameras go up, new government files start, and that phone in your pocket starts spying on you.

In New York the Metropolitan Transit Authority has begun keeping files on people taking photographs or filming the city’s bridges and tunnels. I would presume they are keeping files on people photographing in the subway system as well.

Your new GPS-enabled cell phone knows where you are all the time, and so does your wireless carrier. New research shows that it’s possible to predict patterns of human behavior given someone’s cell phone GPS records. That information could be turned over to law enforcement or intelligence agents without your knowledge.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to embed RFID tags in I-94 arrival/departure documents to track people entering and leaving the country. This should greatly speed up processing for people entering and leaving the country, and allow people to prove they didn’t overstay their visa much more easily, but it depends on if there will be RFID readers anywhere other than at border crossings.

Defense Tech takes a quick look at urban surveillance camera networks, and rightly concludes that in order for them to be effective, someone has to actually watch the video. There aren’t enough people to watch all that footage, they’d all fall asleep anyway, and computers aren’t yet up to the task.

Speaking of cameras, this is what a Homeland Security surveillance vehicle looks like, courtesy Hammer of Truth.

Finally, impressed by the performance of surveillance cameras after the London bombings, France is looking at installing thousands of new surveillance cameras.