Police State?

The Boston Globe did a story today on Massachusett's new GPS tracking system for sex offenders on probation or parole. The subjects will wear an electronic bracelet that the state's system will use to monitor their movements and alert law enforcement officers when the subject enters an "exclusion zone," like a school or playground. This raises an interesting question: how to balance privacy with the need to protect the public? The GPS system is just the latest step in an evolving debate on methods of tracking registered sex offenders. Already their information is available to the public in most states, often on a web site. State officials argue that the importance of protecting the public from this most dangerous class of criminals outweighs any interest in privacy that the sex offenders may have. Critics, on the other hand, worry that this is a step down the road to a pervasive police state, and that it opens the door a little wider to the subjugation of liberty to security.