As you drive to work or to school, license plate readers are systematically tracking where you travel. In major cities, thousands of highly advanced security cameras (many equipped with facial recognition technology) are monitoring your every move. If authorities detect that you are doing something suspicious, they can quickly pull up your criminal, financial and medical records. Of course if they want to dig deeper, your phone and your computer are constantly producing a treasure trove of surveillance data. Nothing that you do on either one of them is ever private.

In the past, compiling all of that information would take a great deal of time.  But now tech giants such as Microsoft, Motorola, Cisco and Palantir are selling "fusion systems" to governments all over the planet.