Government can track us, court rules

August 25th, 2010

Imagine a world where you have absolutely no privacy, similar to Orwell’s dystopian society where privacy is non-existent. A world where the government can spy on you without a warrant and track your every move. Well, welcome to 2010, just 26 years after 1984, where it seems as if that prophecy has come true.

According to this time.com article, The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves, government agents can sneak onto your property and plant a GPS tracking device on the bottom of your car to track your movements and it doesn’t violate your 4th amendment rights because, apparently, you have no expectation of privacy in your own driveway.

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has declared the government can track you in this way almost any time it wants without a search warrant. The court also showed class bias by suggesting that any personal privacy should belong mainly to the very rich.

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.

It seems as if Americans are giving up more and more of their rights to privacy in the name of security and crime-fighting. The government says we must take off our shoes and submit to sometimes invasive searches if we want to fly – in the name of security. The government says we must have a passport if we want to re-enter our own country – in the name of security.

It is true there is a fine balance between privacy and security, but we must find that fine balance. Americans need to draw a line at just how many rights we are willing to give up.

I wonder: how would the framers of the constitution view our current society?

Read this article to get the entire story of how this developed.