If you follow the news about the Supreme Court or about police investigation power, you will know that the Supreme Court made a very important ruling yesterday. The dispute arose because the cops put a GPS tracker on a suspected drug dealer's car and tracked his whereabouts for 4 weeks. The 4th Amendment protects us against "unreasonable search and seizure" from the authorities (Google is welcome to track us as much as they want). The traditional standard for what is "reasonable" is the individual's "reasonable expectation of privacy." So it is up to the judges to decide what is "reasonable."
The problem is that a bunch of old judges who were selected because no Senators had a strong enough opinion to block the nomination. They are usually pretty clueless when it comes to technology. They decided that the reason this search violated the suspect's "reasonable expectation of privacy" is that the cops physically put the tracker on the car and they left it there for four weeks. If it had not been physically attached or had not lasted four weeks, it would have been OK.
Companies all over the world are developing tiny UAVs for military applications. They can easily make up one of their insect sized UAVs with a GPS tracker and a long life battery and sell it to law enforcement. It can follow the car from a few inches away (or even fly underneath the car to be really sneaky) and because it is not physically "touching" the car, it would be totally legal.
As usual, the Supreme Court is right on target in philosophy but way behind technology. I bet any of you could license one of these micro-UAVs, partner up with a techie who can customize it for the law enforcement market, and then advertise it as a response to the Supreme Court decision. You could sell it to thousands of police departments (and government always pay whatever you ask for something unique like this). If you are first on the market and build a tough-guy brand reputation around it, you could get great first mover advantages.
Anyone interested?
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