Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said this week that technological advances could lead to an “Orwellian world.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sotomayor told a crowd Thursday at Oklahoma City University that technology was already able to “listen to your conversations from miles away and through your walls.”
“We are in that brave new world,” she said, “and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too.”
She also warned about the growing use of airborne drones.
“There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property,” Sotomayor said. “That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom.”
“Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion,” she continued. “but I don’t like the fact that someone I don’t know…can pick up, if they’re a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property.”
