Peter Griffin: Keeping track makes us all big brothers

If you've crossed the border into the US in the past few years you'll have noticed the close scrutiny you receive on entry. There are the biometric fingerprint scans, the mug shots they take, the intense examination of you and your dog-eared passport. God help you if you set off the metal detectors.

Within the US, the threat of terrorism has also increased scrutiny of the general populace and brought a rise in the surveillance society. But the quest for a secure homeland in the US has evolved to make big brothers of everyone. Two current examples point to this.

In Texas, Governor Rick Perry plans to spend US$5 million (NZ$8 million) installing hundreds of night-vision cameras on private land along the Mexican border. Sounds reasonable - closed circuit TV cameras are everywhere. And the Mexican border is the key entry point for illegal immigrants, millions of whom use stolen social security numbers to get jobs.

The difference is that Perry wants to connect the cameras to the internet so that anybody on the worldwide web can watch them and call the authorities. There'll be a toll-free line set up to make it nice and easy. The US has dubbed the proposal the "virtual posse".

Opponents say the cameras will be a waste of money and will just lead to dangerous vigilantism. Either way, Perry wants the cameras in place pronto and with the lack of border security a hot topic at the moment, he's likely to get his way.

You can't blame the Americans for wanting to stem the tide of immigrants, but why make a sport of it for the general public? What will people do - leave the camera picture running on their computer screens at work and race for the phone each time a dusty figure scurries into view? Will there be office sweepstakes to see which desk jockey can spot the most immigrants each week?

The dob-in-a-Latino scheme is only the beginning. American parents are being given the tools to monitor the movements of their own kids. Mobile giant Verizon has introduced a service innocuously called Chaperone. On face value, it looks sensible in a country where violent crime is on the increase. Here's how it works: you issue your children with LG-brand phones. The phones use the global positioning system (GPS) to track where your children are.

You can hem them in by specifying an area they are allowed to roam within. If they leave that zone, a text message is sent immediately to a parent's phone.

Another service called Child Locato lets parents invisibly track where their kids are via a computer or their own mobile. These types of GPS services are taking off. Rival operators Nextel and Sprint already have similar offerings in the market and Disney plans to include kid-tracking when it gets into the mobile phone market later this year.

Such services aren't cheap - US$10 - US$20 a month plus US$49 for the handset. It's lucrative business for phone companies. There are good reasons for using such technology, but it does highlight the fact we don't trust each other so we put our trust in technology instead.