We wrote last week about a new government surveillance system called "combat zones." Noah Shachtman has a lot more on the system in this week's Village Voice.

Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.

....The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to "track everything that moves." "This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to have," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank. "Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really wasn't, because there was too much to watch."