A growing number of sheriff’s departments are using iris scans to identify sex offenders, runaways, abducted children and wandering Alzheimer’s patients.

More than 2,100 departments in 27 states are taking digital pictures of eyes and storing the information in databases that can be searched later to identify a missing person or someone who uses a fake name, says Sean Mullin, president of BI{+2} Technologies, which sells the devices.

Morse says his company will deliver test devices to the Defense Department next year that will allow it to scan a crowd and store iris data for many people at once.

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.

A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a “secret room” to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell’s 1984.

The Prince Group, the holding company that owns Blackwater Worldwide, has been building an operation that will sniff out intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations and global political developments for clients in industry and government.

Because of its roster and its ties to owner Erik Prince, the multimillionaire former Navy SEAL, the company’s thrust into this world highlights the blurring of lines between government, industry and activities formerly reserved for agents operating in the shadows.

Powerful supercomputers are vacuuming up so much information that logs of calls to or from innocent Americans could exist in government databases indefinitely, the nation’s top intelligence official said Tuesday.

An untold number of communication logs on US citizens could exist within a NSA database of information gained through warrantless wiretaps of foreigners abroad, McConnell said, because NSA spies do not examine the full contents on all the information it collects until it has a reason to do so.