In what may be another step toward some kind of dystopian teetotaling surveillance state, a grocery store in London is using secret photos that measure biometric facial features of folks buying booze and cigarettes to help prevent underage drinking. The photos are compared to a database of “known underage buyers,” and they are hoping to network the database with other stores across the UK.

Creepy. I wonder how long until grocery stores here start using similar technology.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky reports how to get there in seven steps. A couple of tidbits:

The government's number one target? Peace and justice organizations. From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" --- from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses. ...

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll.

I was happy to see that Gould-Wartofsky linked an old piece of mine about the ballooning number of surveillance cameras on Brown's campus. I still remember being shocked when a campus police official told me that "there are people that are constantly testing the fences" and another gave this explanation for the big new investment in cameras: "We're operating in a post-9/11 environment." Yes, on the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island.