For many decades now, Americans who say they don’t have a problem with the proliferation of government-installed video cameras on public roadways have used the argument that if motorists are not doing anything wrong, then they shouldn’t object to being monitored. Obey the law, they say, and no worries.

This makes a certain amount of sense when it comes to red-light cameras, say. Running red lights is dangerous. Don’t do it.

But there’s a tremendous amount of difference between your City Hall trying to keep local intersections safe, and a federal agency “monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious,” which an Associated Press investigation has found is happening.

A “predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took.”

Currently, it’s the Border Patrol, using a huge network of cameras throughout the country. When they flag a car they don’t like, they ask local law enforcement to pull it over, using a turn-signal pretext, or an air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror. “They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar,” the AP reports.

We don’t feel we are manifesting one teeny-tiny bit of paranoia in our visceral concern that such a nationwide surveillance system could in future be utilized by any number of government agencies to monitor the citizenry: us.

Today, the Border Patrol; tomorrow, who knows? The intrusions will know no bounds, as in China and other authoritarian nations.

“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans,” says Nicole Ozer of the Center for Constitutional Democracy. “These surveillance systems do not make communities safer.”  Instead, they are a clear and present danger.

We call on some patriotic member of Congress to make it their life’s work  to introduce laws dismantling this Big Brotherism before it’s too late.