Lots in the news at the intersection of privacy and technology this week. Take a look at some of the stuff you might have missed:

• LICENSE PLATE SCANNERS: DNC HOST CITY GOES FULL CREEPY The city of Charlotte, NC is about to host the Democratic National Convention. For their troubles, the city is receiving $800,000 worth of license plate readers from the federal government. A blogger writes: "images captured by the cameras will be used to predict future criminal behavior — in other words, images of law abiding citizens will be stored for future use. And not just stored by law enforcement, stored by private companies in proprietary databases and subject to zero public oversight." As we've written about here extensively, "special security events" like these are golden opportunities for police to acquire free toys and powers — toys and powers that often stick around long after the convention halls have cleared of out of town visitors. (More on license plate trackers here.)

• DHS ANNOUNCES $1.3 BILLION IN FINAL GRANT ALLOCATIONS Of that enormous sum, $830 million has been set aside for states and cities to "combat terrorism". What does that actually mean? Lots of that money goes to states and cities for disaster relief and training for first responders. But hundreds of millions of dollars has also been invested in flooding local and state police agencies with "free" surveillance toys and weapons, all without very much debate at the local level, if there's public participation at all. (link)

• AIR FORCE SEEKS SHARPEST NEEDLES IN DATA HAYSTACK The Air Force has a drone called the Gorgon Stare that can suck up unimaginable amounts of data: it "can videotape a 4-kilometer radius of a surveillance area from 12 angles," to be precise. What to do with all that data? (The Air Force isn't the only one; imagine the troubles the NSA must have with data management, given its insatiable appetite for the zeroes and ones that make up our digital private lives?) So what to do with data overload? If you guessed "technology will solve every problem ever," you were right: the Air Force will simply get a computer to do "90 percent of the sifting"! Easy. (link)

• HELLO BIG BROTHER: FBI IS BUILDING A DATABASE OF IRIS SCANS We've been ringing the alarm about this for a while: the FBI is building a massive biometrics data center that it will run jointly with the Department of Defense. Some of that $830 million in DHS funding to states and locals has paid for the purchase of biometrics scanning and cataloging equipment; as we wrote about a while back, Michigan state troopers are particularly enamored. Today Mashable ran a piece on the rapidly accelerating biometrics disaster; it's well worth reading. You should also read our piece on DOD/FBI biometrics integration, because the Mashable piece leaves that out. As usual, Congress is not stepping up to the plate to deal with the privacy implications of this technological revolution in identification. Predictably, the FBI is getting away with whatever it can, while it can. (More on biometrics here.)