The FBI is building a data base of nearly all Americans' faces, and can search it for any reason.

Since it is made from the data bases of photo IDs, that Americans need to have to drive, to ride in a plane, to open a bank account, to buy certain prescription medicines, and in some states even to vote, it amounts to something very close to a national ID card.

When combined with the cameras on the street that recognize faces, they add up to a system of total tracking of everyone's movements.

Of course, this sort of total control over the population makes the work of the police easy. It makes the legitimate activities easy, and the illegitimate ones easy too. It can be used to find rapists, or find heroic whistleblowers.

However, while finding the occasional rapist in hiding is positive, the good it does is puny compared with the harm of intimidating potential heroic whistleblowers. The effect is repressive control that we must overthrow.

Americans, have you the courage to resist the state's seductive offer to "protect" us from various smaller dangers, at the cost of total monitoring?