The NY Times published a story last week about facial recognition software that the government is trying to develop, which would allow law enforcement to pick people out of a crowd from a distance. It’s those last three words — from a distance — that make it difficult, as Ars Technica senior editor Cyrus Farivar explained on my America Weekend show.

I asked him how far along the technology is and how far behind our legal system is in developing laws to protect Americans from being tracked everywhere we go in public. We also discussed which database has photos of all of us that the system can compare images to, whether there’s value in facial recognition for homeland security, and the connection to what Facebook already does in identifying people in pictures posted on the site.

Listen to our conversation here.