They would witness the wild card Ravens handily defeat the Giants, take in a halftime show that featured N'Sync and Aerosmith, and have their faces digitally scanned, analyzed, and cross-referenced with a database of wanted and suspected criminals. They, uh, didn't know about that last part until after the fact.

A few days after the game, thanks to the news media and the American Civil Liberties Union, word got out that the Super Bowl had been a testing grounds for new facial recognition software that mapped and cataloged the facial features of everyone in attendance. The ACLU, and many members of the public, were disturbed.

"Facial recognition was a very new, untested technology and it was still kind of science-fictiony," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. Stanley wasn't yet at the ACLU at the time, but he subsequently penned a report on law enforcement's use of facial recognition technology.