From the first instances of Police in car filming in Texas in the late 1990's to today, we have already entered the George Orwell 'Big Brother' state and it didn't take long to arrive there.

It started in the late 1990's with a few police cars in Texas having bulky VCR's mounted on tripods.  In 200 and 2003 Federal COPS grants brought such filming into even more police cars.  Now most cars are so equipped.

Initially officers did not appreciate video's being made but when it proved that such filming exonerated officers of citizen complaints 96.8 percent of the time it became more accepted.

There seems to be absolutely NO interest in legislation limiting either dashboard filming or the more recent license plate scanning.  Some officers even have cameras attached to their uniforms so even if the angle on the dash camera won't show the citizen contact the uniform camera will pick up both a video and audio.

Info on license plate scanners is found at:  http://www.mdjonline.com/view/full_story/23153936/article-Car-surve...

Details on how filming started can be found at: http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=di...

and also

http://www.break.com/article/a-brief-history-of-the-dash-cam-2425146