Reddit reviews The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State

That's actually not exactly true - the information has been out there for a while. Programs like this have been implemented since before 9/11 but they weren't very effective due to the constraints. The Patriot Act strengthened the programs by giving them more leeway - if you want to read more on the matter I highly recommend The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State by Shane Harris which does a good job chronicling the matter. Truthfully, I was surprised by the uproar because this information has been out there for quite some time.

You need to read the book The Watchers by Shane Harris https://www.amazon.com/Watchers-Rise-Americas-Surveillance-State/dp/0143118900

POI used him and that book for many of their sources of information. The book explains that they do have a system(s), although not as efficient as the Machine in POI world.

Personally, I do not think there will ever be one as successful or correct as the show. The problem, even technical hurdles aside, is political and bureaucracy battles hinder most of these types of operations. Inter-agency battles have shown (9-11 Commission) that even when they have relevant data that it sometimes gets overwhelming and just flags everyone. Even when alerted, they sometimes miss things. And soley trusting an automated machine to just give them a number without further research (premise of the show?) is unlikely.

Would I be open to it? Arent we already used to some type of machine(s) doing this today (at least in the UK and US)?

A few years ago a book came out called The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. This 'surveillance' has been going on for decades and there has been a continued 'fight' among those ordering surveillance, doing the surveillance, the the lawyers/politicians who are trying to think up all the consequences of this 'surveillance', which can come back to screw them or any individual US citizen.

The problem that will always exist, because of the amount of technology available today, is that the NSA (or any other organization) will never have enough people to comb through the information they are able to collect. The solution is to either have a few authorized personnel who go through specific information for specific targets, keeping leaks and abuse at a minimum, or sub-contracting this work to hundreds, or even thousands, and allowing for analysis to be performed on a large scale while simultaneously exposing private information to all those hundreds or thousands of analysts, who will still not be able to fully analyze the information at their disposal. At best, the former is the only option I can see being allowed and/enforced, with a separate set of rules/laws to allow for transparency and privacy to continue to exist.

Read a book. You might learn something. http://www.amazon.ca/The-Watchers-Americas-Surveillance-State/dp/0143118900