Who is spying on private citizens, and why?

Warantless tracking of individuals

I think the article speaks for itself. Here is a brief run down:

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car. Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

What is going on? How did private citizens become the enemy all of a sudden? We are starting to turn into the very entities that our parents and grandparents fought against. We spend so much time and energy worrying about places like Libya, Iraq, Syria, Israel, yet our own backyard is a complete mess. We go around the world jamming democracy down the throats of others, yet we can't even be bothered to practice what we preach. The Middle East board is lit up with constant back and forth on Isreal, Palestine, and Iran, yet we can't even say boo when our domestic governments are doing the exact same thing to us.

Welcome to the American Police State, we don't care if you enjoy your stay, just make us money and shut up.