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There are also, of course, worries about the creeping power of government, and the routinization of surveillance. Right now, BI monitors mostly offenders who have done something seriously wrong, and although its anklets enable parole and probation officers to lay down very specific location itineraries, in practice most just mark off home and work spaces. But there is no reason, as the technology gets cheaper and the monitoring ever more fine-grained, why electronic monitoring could not be used to impose an ever wider range of requirements on an ever wider range of "criminals." A serious felon might have every second of his day tracked, whereas a lighter offender like myself—recently caught lead-footed by a traffic camera—might be required to carry a tracker that issues an alert any time I move faster than 65 miles per hour. (If such an intervention sounds far-fetched, recall that many jurisdictions in the United States already require convicted drunk drivers to pass an ignition-mounted Breathalyzer test before they can start their cars.)
The technology is already largely in place for such forms of Big Brother surveillance. In theory, they'd require little more than a creative judge to impose them, and someone behind a monitor in an office somewhere to enforce them. And that's before you even begin spinning out the science-fiction scenarios, which themselves might not be so very far off. Right now the electrostatic patches made by BI and others monitor the sweat of parolees only for alcohol. But why stop there? Despite some practical hurdles, they could perhaps be upgraded to taste other substances, such as amphetamines or other drugs. And if patches can ensure that certain foreign substances remain out of the bloodstream, why not ensure that others are added to it—pharmaceuticals, say, to inhibit libido or muzzle aggression or keep psychosis at bay. They could even, again in theory, police the natural substances in our sweat, our hormones and neurotransmitters, the juices that determine our moods and desires. No machine currently exists that could sniff out criminal intent, or schizophrenia, or sexual arousal, from the armpits of a parolee or probationer, but the forward march of technology suggests that such a device is far from impossible, and that perhaps someday routine monitoring by authorities could be used to map convicts not just geographically but emotionally as well. If, for instance, the parole officer for a convicted rapist saw that his charge was in a state of highly elevated aggression, fear, and arousal, he might ask the police to pay an immediate visit to deter a possible crime—or, perhaps, interrupt a consensual encounter.