Though I can be as paranoid as the rest of us (or the best of us), I tend to feel that cameras are as ubiquitous as sliced bread. Mold on bread is called penicillin and can cure some diseases or kill you if you're allergic. Cameras are like bread mold in several other ways. They even make pink cameras now (as well as the invisible variety of course).
Our hopes that cameras in public places will be accessible by the public are rather naive and impossible to both enforce and even imagine. Every single human on this planet has access to cell phones (even in third world countries, they can use someone else's at hand) and nearly ever cell phone has a camera. Since we all go out in public daily, how would we register and control all these public cameras? No way, Josie.
Now another well-known fact (in the security realm) is that flying and satellite cameras see many things we'd rather they don't. Even though few of us are true "Enemies of the State" (Gene Hackman / Will Smith -- good movie, BTW), we certainly can't expect a stupid and corpulent government out of control to have any inkling about not destroying all those other waterboarding tapes.
Oh, don't worry about making the Mods upset with this issue...you'll know when *that* happens.
We are already there every time we pick up the phone. How many people get sweaty phone-ear? The Matrix has you.
You know in Japan they have phones with cameras AND electric razors? I want a cell phone blender and a camera I can submerge in my drink. If you make it, some idiot will buy it.
I also heard about an MIT project to imbed a camera lens and CCD into the human eyeball, and we already know about digital retinae that allow blind people to see crude dots. Surely the cybernetic revolution will continue and have RAM chips wired into our brains with transmitters so the cameras will be in our own heads. Scary thought, but so are toasters.
Light rays scatter and spread, and a big enough lens can see any ass crack at any possible distance (Hubble Telescope especially). To think that a hostile government is going to give us access to the best of their spying devices is completely naive (no offense intended, few of us have ever worked in a satellite spy lab and even the one I saw was fairly primitive by today's technology).
You all know about the dragonfly cams, right? In Radio Shack today (one of my favorite toy stores) I saw this $30 cheapo remote-controlled dragonfly...would not take much to mount a tiny cam on that rig. I have seen some strange flying devices in the DC area that were not manned nor biological. Now I know I can buy these at Radio Shack.
Also, next time your car gets stolen or your apartment robbed, you'll wish you had that spy cam alarm clock (available at Sharper Image and other popular gadget shops).
-Phrazz
P.S.: Don't forget there really are a few good people in the government, even if the mob mentality dumbs agencies down to a painful denominator. On a daily basis, these people help fix and avoid grave situations in mysterious ways. We shall see some major changes in the next election (hopefully something as simple as condemning waterboarding as torture, if we get someone so brave as to assert this formally and publically ;-}).
I highly recommend Charlie Wilson's War. Funny, but true.
They're also working on a pill-cam that you can swallow to help find tumors and other nasties in your GI tract.