Well, here's some fun news to kick off your weekend -- it's legal for the government, without a warrant, to place a tracking device on your car while it's sitting in your driveway, then follow your every move.

That's according to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which ruled that the Drug Enforcement Agency was within its rights when agents, attempting to monitor a suspected marijuana grower in Oregon, sneaked onto his property at night and placed a GPS tracker on his vehicle.

The court ruled that homeowners are not entitled to an expectation of privacy for their driveways if they are publicly accessible, even though it's their property. (That being the case, I owe several trick-or-treaters a serious apology.)

It's implied that if a homeowner can afford to build a fence around his property, or have it patrolled by attack hounds, he gets his privacy. That's good news if you're Montgomery Burns. For the rest of us ... er, probably not so much.

Conflicting decisions in other districts suggest the issue will end up before the Supreme Court. What are the political ramifications here? Can liberals and conservatives agree that the Orwellian overtones transcend ideology in this case? Or should the government really have the right to do this?

E-mail Troy Reimink: treimink@grpress.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/troyreimink