This is particularly true in healthcare, where wearable technology is transforming the monitoring of people's health by measuring their heart rates and blood pressure.
Ostensibly, this allows the state to keep track of sales tax, but Mr. Massoud said it opened the door for government monitoring of people's buying habits.
With appropriate monitoring of people's safety, research with psychoactive drugs is no more risky than many other research procedures in neuroscience and medicine.
The government might also contribute a nominal amount, or help pay for medical monitoring of people who have been exposed to asbestos but are not sick.
As a home health nurse, I was especially frustrated with the Medicare and insurance company regulations, which did not allow for long-term monitoring of people with end-stage conditions or severe disabilities but only treatment of acute episodes.
Under the law, the government must in most cases obtain a warrant from the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before it can begin electronic monitoring of people suspected of spying or terrorism.
The shift was part of a larger set of reforms designed to increase the local oversight and monitoring of people receiving care services, said Danette Castle, the chief executive of the Texas Council of Community Mental Health and Mental Retardation Centers.
Initially complacent, politicians around the world began to react, accelerating medical research, imposing tight monitoring of people arriving at international airports from affected countries, and, most importantly, trying to help contain the crisis in West Africa.
Ministers are seeking to introduce "blind marking" of pupils' schoolwork by teachers as part of a push to tackle a history of underachievement among black and ethnic minority groups, while banks will be required to carry out ethnic monitoring of people to whom they lend money.
The plan, which is generally used when the heat index -- a measure of the combined effect of heat and humidity -- rises above 100, calls for public service announcements about heat-related illnesses, careful monitoring of people at risk for those illnesses, and the opening of public cooling centers.
And West Virginia, which has had one of the fastest-growing prison systems, enacted a law to reduce the number of inmates by giving money to local counties to develop alternatives to prison, like electronic monitoring of people on probation and centers where probationers would report each day.
