You can file this one under: “What in the fuckety fuck?”

Surveillance in the U.S. may be entering a new high in terms of technological advances, while simultaneously hitting a new low in terms of privacy and other matters. And it appears that Fresno, California, is leading the way. You remember Fresno. It seems that the whole truth is just now being told in terms of how deeply committed to channeling Orwell’s Big Brother this town is.

Fresno’s police department is now using technology to assess the threat levels of its residents. Utilizing software that analyzes a variety of data, including social media postings, a threat level can be assigned pretty much the same way a credit score is assigned.

Fresno police swear by their system. It’s housed in a control room that brings to mind the one that Batman (Christian Bale) put Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) in charge of in an effort to key in on The Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight. Oh yeah … it’s that kind of party. According to the Washington Post:

“On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.” “The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs.”

What in the fuckety fuck? My bad—I said that already, didn’t I?

The threat-scoring software that makes sense of all this information is called Beware. So what, exactly, does it do?