The notion that scale is irrelevant in terms of surveillance operations fails to recognize serious issues raised by the advent of new technologies. In the past

The notion that scale is irrelevant in terms of surveillance operations fails to recognize serious issues raised by the advent of new technologies. In the past, actual manpower has been a meaningful limit on the size of surveillance operations. The government simply cannot have every person in the country be monitored and watched. Instead - theoretically - the government only has enough resources to surveil those who it actually suspects of a crime. I direct you to Justice Sotomayor's insightful concurring opinion on United States vs. Jones: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing-10-1259_CONCUR_4 http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing... These quotes, in particular, are extremely releveant. -- "And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and community hostility.'" -- "The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'" -- In my view, this opinion sheds much needed light on how the perception that technology and scale does not influence the legality and constitutionality of government practice fails. As a footnote, Sotomayor also discusses privacy in a digital age, and she provides a refreshing outlook on how new technologies can force a society to re-think its beliefs on the expectation of privacy. -- "More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties . . . This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."