Did you know that the government can send agents to sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, plant a GPS tracker on your vehicle, and then proceed to track your every move? No, this isn’t some conspiracy theory, it’s the decision handed down by the Ninth Circuit and reported by Time.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

Why? Because apparently you have no expectation of privacy in your own driveway, regardless of the fact it’s located on your own property. Which raises a question: How can federal agents sneak onto your private property and tamper with your private vehicle without a warrant? The court apparently didn’t explain.

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Except that delivery people are invited by the placement of an order to be sent to the address. Children are permitted because they’re children and people tend not to complain. But if you ask these individuals to leave and they don’t, they’re still trespassing. It’s your property — a fact the Ninth Circuit evidently disregards.

But wait, the ruling gets worse. According to the Ninth Circuit, the government can also track you, again using the GPS tracker, wherever you go, without a warrant.

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Here’s the good news: The Ninth Circuit doesn’t have the final say in this matter, and indeed the court is overruled more often than any other. Literally. It’s a pro-big government court known for its awful decisions.

The Supreme Court is extremely unlikely to permit this ruling to stand, and in fact I’d expect liberals and conservatives to join together — even if the decision into unanimous — to overrule the Ninth. The decision was too obviously a violation of privacy rights.