It's happening in Australia too. I spoke to a CEO of a company here a few years ago which provides software and services to the government and RTA/RMS. There are cameras setup under overpasses which automatically take photos of each individual car and it's passengers.
In this particular incident their company was tasked with processing all of those photos to identify/track a guy who had murdered his wife and was on the run. Sure enough the system had snapped a pic of him driving, with his dead wife in the passenger seat.
A good use of the tech in that scenario, but I'm sure it's being used for mass surveillance as well.