As the article mentioned, these field contact cards have been around for a long time. A few were even filed on me in my youth ;-). The problem is when it was a simple card system there was an inherent time limit on the usefulness of the info. The police officer had to recall filling out a card that might tie someone to a crime. And I doubt that cards were kept in perpetuity since the value of the info (for criminal investigations) fell rather quickly over months or a year. In a major case, such as a murder, investigators might do a blind search of all the cards filed in some area around the time of the murder to find leads, suspects or potential witnesses so the card system was a valuable tool for legitimate police action. Now that everything is computerized there is no longer any time limit on the data and the potential for abuse is now becoming clear. So the time limit on the collected data that was implicit has to be made explicit as a matter of policy instead of tacitly due the limits of the system for the collection and use of the info. The real problem is that explicitly drawing that line is forcing us to clearly define the nature of government and what "freedom" actually means.