This article, from Time (of all places), is not very comforting:

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 [gulp], 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 goes on to detail how a man suspected of growing marijuana had his car secretly tagged with a GPS device—without a warrant—and how the ruling stated that the wealthy have a greater expectation to privacy in the area around their homes than the middle-class and the poor.

It's a little odd and a little terrifying to read an article from Time (of all places) that includes a sentence like this: "we are one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi."

When Time (of all places) compares the US government to the Stasti—well, it's not a good sign.

Hey Tea Partiers (and liberals and conservatives): This is a civil-rights, big-government issue that's worth your time and attention.