Wednesday

A Wisconsin appellate court has just ruled that the police may secretly come onto private property and secretly install into a private automobile a GPS tracking devise, thus enabling them to follow the movement of the driver of the automobile; all without a search warrant issued by a judge. I am steamed over this, and argue that it is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights and, if not overturned and if following by police (which it will be), it will lead us to a society like East Germany, where everyone spied on everyone else. The notion of the government continuously watching us, in private or in public, is profoundly un-American. It violates what Justice Louis Brandeis called, the highest of all rights: “The right to be left alone.”