The Minneapolis Star-Tribune found its reporters, even the city's mayor, were being tracked repeatedly.

Big Brother is watching you — or so was the theme of the classic dystopian novel, “1984.”  But as Americans have started to recognize lately, that may not be just a matter of science fiction.  Just weeks after the revelation that the federal government is tracking telephone and Internet traffic comes the disclosure that police around the country are also tracking license plates by the millions.

A growing network of police cameras not only know who has driven through an intersection or, perhaps, into a crime-plagued neighborhood, but authorities now can capture, store and stitch together an image of where a particular vehicle might be driven over a period of time.

That information, authorities contend, can help them track child abusers, drug dealers and terrorists. But the flip side is that citizens not accused of any crimes are also landing in the databases that, in some instances, are openly available and provide a record of individual movements.

The news, revealed as part of a new study published by the American Civil Liberties Union, raises new questions about the state of individual freedom in the United States. Yet despite drawing a wide range of headlines it is far from certain how the public will react.

In fact, police and federal authorities aren’t the only ones taking advantage of the latest breakthroughs in technology.  A wide range of new devices – as well as smartphone apps – can be used to track where someone is driving, whether a teenager learning to drive or, perhaps, a potentially wayward spouse.

“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the ACLU in Washington, D.C.

The often controversial organization’s new study was intended to give a more complete picture on the tracking systems going into increasingly widespread use by law enforcement authorities around the country.

What was once a costly and rare technology has become something commonplace and reasonably affordable. In fact, as government budgets get cut, some law enforcement agencies argue that the systems have become cost-effective where it is no longer possible to use police officers to follow and personally track potential criminals.

The devices can be permanently mounted to a building, a stop light, bridge, and there are even apps a police offer can download to a smartphone. The ACLU reports that a cop on a “normal patrol” might individually capture as many as 7,000 license plate images during a routine daily shift.

In turn, those pictures are fed through software that can turn images into text. So, anyone captured by one of the devices will land up in a record of who was seen driving by a specific location at a particular time of day.

One of the concerns raised by the ACLU study is that this information can be stored indefinitely, providing a running record of where law-abiding individuals, as well as criminals, might travel.  That could include politicians, lawyers, journalists and others who might have need to maintain a degree of secrecy, never mind average citizens who simply don’t like the idea of having their movements captured in a government file.

The ACLU report wasn’t a complete revelation.  Authorities have often been quite open about the technology, sometimes citing the license plate tracking systems for helping capture a wanted criminal or locating a vehicle linked to a child abduction.

“At a time of fiscal and budget constraints, we need better assistance for law enforcement,” Harvey Eisenberg, assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland, told the Associated Press, adding that such technology has helped capture 132 wanted suspects in his area.

But a study by the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently found that among the 4.9 million license plate images captured by the cities 10 cameras, Mayor R.T. Rybak’s car was tracked 41 different times. And one of the paper’s reporters was captured seven times.  The paper also noted that the information was open to anyone who wanted it until the police began restricting the list late in 2012.

“These plate readers are not intended nor used to follow the movements of members of the public,” the Yonkers police department told the AP.

But as that oft-quoted line from the film “Casablanca” suggests, the cameras indiscriminately sweep up “the usual suspects,” in this case, anyone who passes one of the fixed cameras or mobile devices and, with rare exception, there’s nothing to prevent the resultant data from being kept in an archive indefinitely.

The state of Maryland told the ACLU that its scanners tracked 60,000 plates linked to some civil or criminal violation, mostly such things as a suspended or revoked registration, though some more serious criminal activity also was tracked. Even so, that accounted for just 60,000 of the 29 million license plates the state captured.

At a Sacramento shopping mall, a tracking system run by a private security firm did identify 51 stolen vehicles during a 27-month period – but it also captured license plate information on 3 million vehicles in the process.

The ACLU study was based on 26,000 pages of information gathered from 263 police departments and other law enforcement agencies around the country.

While it found that some agencies, such as the Minneapolis police, have tightened their own policies on the use of license plate data, the ACLU noted just five states have specific laws governing the technology. Maine and Arkansas set a time limit for keeping such records. New Hampshire allows license plate tracking only in limited circumstances.

The consensus among authorities is that there’s no expectation of privacy for vehicles traveling on public roads and, indeed, the Supreme Court has generally upheld that position, though in one recent case it restricted the use of GPS-based tracking devices without a court order.

Do Americans care? As the brouhaha over telephone tracking suggests, there is at least some concern among the public about the loss of privacy.  But police aren’t the only ones using technology to track motorists.

There are a variety of devices, services and smartphone apps that make it easy to keep an eye on a teenager, a wayward spouse or, perhaps, a business competitor.  These include the “Find My iPhone” app from Apple, and OnStar’s “Family Link,” the latter allowing a vehicle owner to follow its movements on a computer screen or to get e-mail and text alerts at set times of day.

In fact, there are a growing number of Americans who willingly let Big Brother – or at least Big Business – watch them in order to save a few bucks. Progressive and Travelers are two of the insurance companies that will dangle potentially lower rates in front of clients in return for using monitoring devices that can prove whether or not they drive safely.

So, if Americans are willing to trade privacy for cash, they just might accept police tracking systems on the oft chance that they might – very rarely – prevent or solve a crime.