And if they do, I'm sure the Democrats would never grant them retroactive immunity for them anyhow. Sure, Bush, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama did just that for the telcos with FISA [cough] reform, but the two situations are completely different. For some reason. But isn't technology swell? The great Walter Pincus:

[S]ome insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

"The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems," according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in space and intelligence matters.

"Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public," he said.

Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait -- in other words, human identification.

Of course, the volume of data is so great that it's hard to analyze -- hence the contract for working out how to index it.