US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has voiced concerns that, without sufficient protections, the age of unmanned drones and ubiquitous surveillance will usher in an “Orwellian world.”

Sotomayor told faculty and students at Oklahoma City University last week that technological capabilities allow devices to monitor“your conversations from miles away and through your walls.”

“We are in that brave new world, and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too,” she added, in a nod to George Orwell’s seminal authoritarian-dystopia novel ‘1984.’

Sotomayor also discussed the rise of drone use in wider society.

“There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property,” Sotomayor said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don’t like the fact that someone I don’t know…can pick up, if they’re a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property.”

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