Such a database might be extremely valuable to local employers screening the people they hire. As Hendricks explains, while conviction information becomes a part of the public record, arrest information does not, and that's where the webcam changes the rules. "This whole thing is a potential end run around the traditional privacy that's developed for arrest information," says Hendricks.

Technology that can match faces to names is neither futuristic nor far-fetched, as the Super Bowl fans discovered. Nineteen "matches" were found when images of their faces were captured and compared with face-recognition technology against thousands of images of wanted criminals provided by the FBI, Secret Service and local police.

Executives at Viisage, which provided the face-recognition technology used at the Super Bowl this year, are puzzled by all the fuss about the filming of football fans, whose images were compared with thousands of images of wanted criminals provided by the FBI, Secret Service and local police. Tom Colatosti, Viisage's CEO, says: "The average person is on a surveillance camera 30 times a day. When you go to a gas station, in an elevator, in a parking lot, shopping mall, ATM, Dunkin' Donuts, 7-Eleven, highway -- surveillance is a part of our everyday life." And let's not forget casinos and banks and airports and border crossings.

"All the uproar is about the potential of what could happen," Colatosti says, by which he means the potential for databases of images to be used to track an individual from place to place. "That doesn't happen, because the images are not stored, and secondly, apart from [providing] good copy [for reporters] and paranoia, who would want to track your face? I can tell you that law enforcement has enough images in the database without cluttering it up with useless images of some fan going to a football game."

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But privacy experts like Phil Agre, an associate professor of information studies at UCLA and co-editor of "Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape," says that while that kind of tracking hasn't happened yet, it's coming. "As soon as face recognition goes prime time, the world changes instantaneously overnight. You walk past a store and you get junk mail from that store. You walk into the store and the salesperson mysteriously knows your name. People going into business, selling files of who has been where -- a market springs up. I'm not saying the consequences are all bad -- it has law enforcement and crime protection as well as Big Brother kind of consequences."

Already, throughout the borough of Newham in London, 300 cameras monitor the streets looking for known criminals. "If you institute this properly, you can get the support of the public," says Frances Zelazny of Visionics, the company that makes the face-recognition technology used in Newham. "You always have the fringe, but in general this is a neighborhood where people feel afraid."

But is it worth it to trade a fear of crime for a fear of being watched? The EFF's Steele believes that as people become more aware of how their images are being captured and used, there will be a backlash: "I do suspect that people are going to kind of grab back their privacy rights at some point, but we're not there yet."

Hendricks also thinks that there will be a backlash to the intrusion, but by then the cameras won't just be everywhere -- they'll be hooked together: "These cameras will be integrated into a network just the way that computers were by the Internet."

There are some small efforts to combat the proliferation of this style of public broadcasting. In Arizona, state Rep. Gabrielle Giffords recently introduced legislation that would require notification of video surveillance in public places, but the bill languished in committee and then was superseded by another bill (which also died) that would have created a committee to study the issue. Giffords plans to reintroduce the legislation next session.

Still, for now it seems that we have as much control over our images in public spaces as do the inmates of Madison Street Jail. "If you're in a public place, you don't have much defense, unless your image is being used for commercial purposes," says Thomas Coleman, author of "It's Mine, Not Yours! Take Back Your Personal Information and Privacy." And if there used to be no easy way for the images from the cameras in the Madison Street Jail to make it into your living room, now there's an easy way for your own image to go places that you can't even picture.

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