There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
-1984, George Orwell
It may not be quite as bad as 1984, but 2008 seems to be taking the right steps in that direction. According to the Washington Post, numerous police departments around the country have been finding suspect’s vehicles, attaching portable GPS tracking devices to them and then tracking their movements for weeks at a time, even while the vehicle was traveling on private property.
Law enforcement officials say this is nothing different than surveilling a suspect’s vehicle or attaching a beeper to a vehicle which relay’s its location to police, something upheld by the Supreme Court in 1983. Though the United States Supreme Court has yet to issue a decision on GPS tracking, detractors say that this new usage of GPS devices grants law enforcement officials unparalleled access to an individual’s movements. As Chris Leibig, defense attorney for someone recently tracked with a GPS device, states, “[w]hile it is true that police can conduct surveillance of people on a public street without violating their rights, tracking a person everywhere they go and keeping a computer record of it for days and days without that person knowing is a completely different type of intrusion.”
Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program, considers GPS monitoring, along with license plate readers, toll transponders and video cameras with face-recognition technology, part of the same trend toward “an always-on, surveillance society.”
This is what a slippery slope looks like from the top of the hill.