What is the current state of the law on surveillance by the police state?

Then came Burkholder v. Superior Court (1979) 96 Cal.App.3d 421, 158 Cal.Rptr. 86. It holds an aerial surveillance of 1,500 feet aided with binoculars does not transgress the Fourth Amendment because it is an "unobtrusive" observation. (Id., at p. 426, 158 Cal.Rptr. 86.) What was unobtrusive, however, was the airplane, not the observation. But that is not the constitutional issue we face. It is the surveillance which counts, not the extent of our perception of the object from which the surveillance occurs. Burkholder provides a perfect rationale for discrete surveillance, which may be all the more effective in destroying privacy for its secrecy. This is a hallmark of the police state; the term secret police is not without content.