By Daniel Zwerdling

Science-fiction writers have fantasized for years about the government monitoring everything we do. For example, there's a classic scene in the 2002 movie The Bourne Identity, which portrays young government agents glued to computer monitors in a crowded room. In seconds, they are able to track almost everywhere Jason Bourne, the main character, has been and where he's going — his flights, train trips and hotels.

One agent gets a photo of Bourne talking to a woman in an alley from a surveillance camera hundreds of miles away. Almost instantly, they identify her, apparently using facial recognition software, and pull up the digital records of her life — including her family biography and her utility bills from three countries.

The woman is just a bystander, but the movie suggests that the minutiae of someone's life can make anyone look guilty.

"I don't like her," the unit chief mutters. "I want to go deep. I want to know every place she's slept in the last six years."

Back in the real world, could government agents really sit in a room and gather that information in 60 seconds or less? "No," says Kevin Bankston, senior attorney with the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology. But "that is the world we're moving toward."

He says one reason is the digital revolution itself. For instance, Facebook uses software now that identifies people from photos. Stores are reportedly using facial recognition programs, so the staff can learn the names of customers almost the moment they stroll through the door.

Bankston says there's another reason the government is beginning to obtain digital records faster and faster — if not yet instantly as it does in movies: The laws that regulate the government were written back in the analog age, so the government often doesn't have many legal restraints. America's founders were not thinking about computers when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

Rights Under The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment of the Bill Rights, ratified in 1791, has traditionally been Americans' "principal constitutional protection against government spying," says David Cole, a lawyer who teaches ****constitutional law and national security at Georgetown University. As the amendment states, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."