Time: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
Read, and be amazed. As far as I know, this is no April Fools' joke. There's a bunch of other good privacy-themed articles on time.com as well.
Of course, the idea that where you drive in your car is in any way your business is increasingly becoming bankrupt in the West. With surprisingly little fuss, the UK has now installed a nationwide system of cameras that read number plates. You can read about it here.
The way Big Brother is sneaking up on us is frightening.
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