For example, there are now cameras where an officer can drive through a parking lot and read all the license plate numbers, running them through the DMV database, and seeing if any are expired, stolen, etc. It’s not to hard to imagine the same algorithm applied to normal traffic cameras to do the same thing with moving vehicles, or even to measure speed between stoplights. You could basically track the movement of any car all over town.

Right now, in the US there are plenty of technological measures available to protect communications – nearly every desktop email client has support for S/MIME or PGP encryption. The thing is that almost nobody uses it because it’s too hard to get started with. The only way for that to change would be for a software vendor (Say Mozilla with Thunderbird) to make security the default – issue a certificate as a part of email account creation, and dumb down it’s use to the point that it would actually get used.

When the nation was founded, they didn’t write in protection for personal privacy, as it just wasn’t needed – if you needed to conduct business in private, there were no invasive technological inroads. Now, any request for personal privacy tends to be interpreted as “what do you have to hide?”. People have legitimate reasons to hide things, be they business trade secrets, financial information, or simple things like sending the password to a wireless network to someone who needs it.