Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars

Makes sense to me. If sticking a GPS transmitter on your car violates a fundamental right to <i>privacy</i>, surreptitiously following your car with a combination of cars, closed-circuit cameras, helicopters, and whatever-the-hell else they use must violate that same right. Yet clearly the police can surveille whoever they want without a warrant.

I think this is a good indication that the right to privacy is obsolete. If an investigator can hear a conversation you're having in your house using amplification technology, who needs a warrant?<p>The whole point of the right to privacy, as I understand it, is protection against over-zealous police forces enforcing unjust laws. If you're doing something in private, and it doesn't affect anyone, you should be allowed to do it, regardless of the law.<p>We need a right to anonymous private activity, regardless of where or how it takes place.

GPS tracking is the tip of the iceberg. I bet we're not 10 years away from the cops being able to put an all in one video-audio-gps-wifi snooper the size of an ipod-nano on you, your car, house, boat, whatever. And given how fast hardware commoditizes, the device will probably cost under $500. If these hypothetical devices become equipped to tweet, then everybody is fucked. It sure gives me confidence that our law enforcement worker-bees are amongst the most trustworthy, noble and incorruptible Americans out there! In many countries, everybody implicitly understands the police are corrupt, and basically operate like the biggest, legal gang themselves. <i>/sarcasm</i><p>Thanks a lot technologically myopic courts for setting such a dangerous legal precedent!<p>On the bright side, isn't it trivial and relatively cheap to make a radio detector of GPS and other such radio transmissions? Or even a signal jammer? Like what the spies use to sweep a room for listening devices? Let's just assume you're cool with temporarily violating FCC broadcast regulations within a small personal vicinity. ;)<p>Unintended consequences are my favorite however. Perhaps, if we're lucky, this situation might just invert, and if total surveillance becomes dirt cheap, then it also means we can watch the watchers. Imagine a Facebook for watching every LE agent in real time across the entire country. Sounds laughable, but technology changes fast! (I bet certain global crime cartels already have something like this, in crude beta—all it takes is one mole and you've got the right data to connect the dots.)