Sure, but why aren't they tracking everyone on foot? It's not because it's illegal, and it's not for lack of desire either - it's simply too expensive. So giv

Sure, but why aren't they tracking everyone on foot? It's not because it's illegal, and it's not for lack of desire either - it's simply too expensive. So given the current law, you can express LEO behavior as a function of tracker cost: $10000: Use GPS trackers never, send patrolmen instead. We agree that this is suboptimal. $500?: Tag more people of interest than you could do on foot, involving some-but-not-many unrelated persons. $100?: Tag more vehicles, with a concomitant rise in data collection not related to any current investigation. $1: Tag every vehicle related even tangentially to an investigation, just on principle. This I would not approve of - how about you? From that I conclude that there's some lower price bound at which the freedom/security tradeoff turns against us. I don't think we're there yet - I don't disapprove of anything reported in the article. But it'll happen eventually, and we should figure out how those laws should work before there's a de facto standard in law enforcement, because that standard will be "use them every time". Police work is terribly hard as it is; any further handicaps that we feel we need to impose must have the force of law behind them.