“So this is how freedom dies…with thunderous applause.” – George Lucas

Thousand of miles above crime ridden Mexico City flew the fabled “eye in the sky.”  A demo by Persistant Survalence Systems is nothing but a dot in the clouds to those below but up above, an aircraft equipped with high tech cameras is watching every citizen’s move.

These wide angle cameras can see a huge area of land in high enough definition to track the movement of cars and even people.  All the law enforcement had to do was wait for a crime to be reported.

Once a call came in, the systems operator pinpointed the location and time of the crime.  From there the suspects could be tagged and their movement tracked forward and backward in time; backward to see where they came from and forward to present time to determine where they were hiding.   The police literally had the ability to read time like a book.

Big brother just rewrote the game.

But it goes even further.  This criminal was seen meeting with multiple other groups and through analysis of the patterns of all these suspects movement the system was able to determine the main headquarters of a entire organized crime cartel!

So to recap, in a one week demo this system was able to neutralize an entire crime cartel and solve a murder…pretty impressive.

But this power does come at a cost; some might even call it a invasion of privacy.  Frankly, it is…  Although the cameras aren’t strong enough to identify people, it is literally watching everything day and night; a bit too Orwellian for those who value privacy and the freedoms that follow.

However, this technology does seem to be an inevitability of the future.

Fear is hauntingly motivating.  And with enough pressure even the most brave will beg for their freedoms to be taken away in favor of security.

It can only take one disaster for the masses to start crying out for devices like this “eye in the sky.”

And what is really terrifying is what comes after we give these freedoms away…