I Spy with My Many Eyes: The Government’s Unbridled Use of Your Surveillance Cameras

Authors

Brian A. Weikel

Abstract

Surveillance cameras are increasingly used by the public and law enforcement to prevent and prosecute criminal activity. Individuals and companies can grant law enforcement access to private cameras for both live monitoring feeds and recorded footage, thereby creating a quasi- public network of private cameras. According to the third-party doctrine, the government can access all information from these surveillance cameras without a subpoena or warrant and without infringing upon Fourth Amendment privacy protections. However, as technology advances and the prevalence of surveillance cameras rises, this per se rule fails to account for one’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the public and private spheres.

This Note examines the 2022 San Francisco ordinance, which authorizes the government to use private cameras in a wide variety of circumstances. Specifically, it reviews the ordinance through the mosaic theory, whose proponents champion as a necessary correction to the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights and whose opponents condemn as doctrinally flawed and impractical to administer. To address the theory’s doctrinal shortcomings, this Note reviews the historical development of privacy protections with each new technology considered by the Supreme Court. To demonstrate how the theory may be applied to other technologies, this Note analyzes the circuit court split on whether the warrantless use of pole cameras constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. Pole cameras serve as a useful proxy for private cameras under the ordinance.

Ultimately, this Note recommends that the San Francisco ordinance be modified to safeguard an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy by adding a notice requirement with camera stickers and adjacent signs, requiring police officers to provide camera owners with a brief descriptive justification for each requested video, and limiting the duration of access to live and historical feeds for each event.

Recommended Citation

Brian A. Weikel, I Spy with My Many Eyes: The Government’s Unbridled Use of Your Surveillance Cameras, 75 Hastings L.J. 505 (2024).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol75/iss2/7