EFF to Supreme Court: Warrantless 24-Hour Video Surveillance Outside Homes Violates Fourth Amendment

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Police in Illinois Filmed Defendant’s Home Nonstop for 18 Months

Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged the Supreme Court today to review and reverse a lower court decision in United States v. Tuggle finding that police didn’t need a warrant to secretly record all activity in front of someone’s home 24 hours a day, for a year and a half.

The Fourth Amendment protects people against lengthy, intrusive, always-on video recording—especially when that video records all activity outside their homes, EFF said today in a  brief filed with the court. Our homes are our most private and protected spaces, and police should not film everything that happens at the home without prior court authorization—even if police cameras are positioned on public property. In this case, police used three cameras mounted on utility poles to secretly record Travis Tuggle’s life 24/7 for 18 months. Surveillance like this can reveal intimate details of our private lives, such as when we’re home, who visits and when, what packages we receive, who our children are, and more.

The Supreme Court recognized in the landmark 2018 case Carpenter v. United States that tracking people’s physical movements using cell phone records creates a chronicle of our lives, and collecting such data without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. Because of its capacity to create detailed records of what goes on at people’s homes, long-term, warrantless pole camera surveillance is likewise unconstitutional.

EFF, along with the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is urging the Supreme Court to take

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