Nevertheless, it is likely that the threat of terrorism and organised crime, and the precedent of existing methods for tracking money, will be strong counter-arguments in favour of tracking technology.

ECONOMIST: Money of the future may almost literally talk

The methods they used to avoid detection were straight out of a crime novel - they wrote cryptic notes using numbers and letters and spoke in code on the phone.

BBC: Operation Beath

And it also leaves out the fact that you could certainly use other methods, as other cities do, to force crime down that don't rely on this kind of very aggressive stop-and-frisk activity that embarrasses and humiliates, and most importantly, drives people away from police.

NPR: The Difficulties Of Proving Racial Profiling