WillCAD

APHIS is a database of fingerprints. You get into that database in basically two ways - being arrested (in which case your addition to the database is non-consensual), or working for the government (in which case your addition is consensual). When someone is arrested, their fingerprints are taken and compared to the database to determine whether they are who they say they are at the time of the arrest, and to determine whether they're wanted in another jurisdiction for some other crime.

License plate readers compare images of plates, taken in the wild, to the DMV database. They can be used to track vehicles' whereabouts and movements. The images they take, since they are taken in public on roads and streets, are not taken with the consent of those who own the vehicles, nor is probable cause or even articulable suspicion needed to snap an image in public.

FRT can use the huge existing database of photos from driver's licenses, state IDs, and passports as its search base - most members of whom did NOT consent to be added to the db but were added after the fact and without their knowledge, much less consent. FRT also doesn't just take a static image at a single location and compare it to the db for identification purposes - it can take an image from the db and use it to both search for the whereabouts, and track the movements of, either single individuals or entire groups of people, using input from any sort of video or still camera feeds.

I don't believe there yet is a single big-brother-video data warehouse, as portrayed in Borne movies and TV shows like NCIS, where the Good Guys run pictures of the Bad Guys through FRT and immediately track his location and movements through traffic cams, transportation hub security cams, police surveillance cams, and private security cams like ATMs or the CCTV from 7-11. But given the bulk collection of phone data by the NSA, and the construction of their huge data center in Utah, the possibilities for abuse of FRT are frightening even to the non-tinfoil hat crowd. Or at least they should be. The fear of the Big Bwown Muswim Boogie Man has turned us into a nation of cowardly paranoids, ready to allow our government to collect and store every bit of information on us and track our every move, just to make us feel safer from The Big Bad.

Let's face it - the feds cannot even guarantee that they won't load unencrypted personal data onto laptops and allow them to be stolen at Starbucks. How can they guarantee that such a tremendous amount of data-driven power - essentially the ability to track all public movements of any individual in the country - won't be abused? And not just systematically by some shadow government conspiracy; that kind of stuff makes me laugh. I'm far more worried about rogue individuals using this tech illicitly to stalk their girlfriends, get revenge on the guy who bullied them in high school, plan bank heists, or even use it for the benefit of foreign powers (we've had spies in our government before).

Power corrupts. The more power someone has, the more temptation there is to misuse it (justifying it in their mind the whole time, of course). Allowing our government to have such power is a huge mistake. Sure, they say they're going to use it to catch terrorists, but as long as they keep the whole operation tippy-top-secret, we won't know what they're using it for, or how well it works.

Although, we've all seen how well the use of secret evidence to secretly put people on a secret sanction list has worked in the case of the no-fly list, right?