New Tech and National Security Law -- Tile

Who needs the NSA?  Now you can buy Tile for just $20 and track anything you want. Tile is a small white square that you can affix to almost anything.  It's only a few millimeters thick -- thin enough to stick on the back of your cellphone.  Tile uses Bluetooth and connects to an iPhone or iPad.   With the Tile app, you can track all of your Tiles within a small area (between 50 and 150 feet) -- so it will be great for finding lost items. But the real payoff (and the national security implications) will come from crowd-sourcing.  In the commercial sphere, you can mark an item as lost, and its location will be reported back  to you by OTHER iPads and iPhones that come in Tile-contact with your item. So, if you left your book in, say, a restaurant and marked it as a lost Tile, when another Tile app user came in range of your phone it would report the location back to you and you could just trot on down to the restaurant to pick up your lost item. That's a cool functionality -- but it is also the making of a distributed surveillance system.  Imagine if every iPhone (and don't doubt that an Android version is on the way!) were suddenly to become a listening post for a Tile-marked package, of interest to, say, the United States (or Russia).  Given the size, the Tile could easily be surreptitiously attached, making the trackee unaware.   Follow the package and ... at the end of the trip, there you are with Osama bin Laden's location! And, though it is rank speculation on my part, I can readily imagine someone finding a way to enable Tile-tracking on hardware without the knowledge of the cell phone owner.  The mind boggles.