Last week, news broke of Baltimore’s high-tech secret surveillance program. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote, the system was so all-encompassing that “If you’ve visited Baltimore at any point during 2016, there’s a good chance your every movement was tracked by the city’s newest high-tech surveillance program.”
But is this game-changing development in local policing constitutional?
In a new column for Reason, Jim Harper explains:
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The straightforward way to administer this law is to determine when there has been a search or seizure, then to decide whether it was reasonable. With just a few exceptions the hallmark of a reasonable search or seizure is getting a warrant ahead of time.
Applying the “search” concept to persistent aerial surveillance is hard. But that’s where pre-search comes in.
In an ordinary search, you have in mind what you are looking for and you go look for it. If your dog has gone missing in the woods, for example, you take your mental snapshot of the dog and you go into the woods comparing that snapshot to what you see and hear.
Pre-search reverses the process. It takes a snapshot of everything in the woods so that any searcher can quickly and easily find what they later decide to look for.
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