Give them an inch and they take a mile. Sonoma County authorized a drone surveillance program to weed out illegal cannabis farms. A lawsuit alleges the County is conducting warrantless searches for code violations and spying on residents.
The North Bay county of Sonoma initially started the 6-year-old drone program to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but the lawsuit alleges that officials have since turned it into a widespread program to catch unrelated code violations at residential properties and levy millions of dollars in fines. The program has captured 5,600 images during more than 700 flights, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit is asking Sonoma County Superior Court to halt the county's use of drones with a warrant. Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a Wednesday news release that the county "has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media."
SF Gate
There are several reports in the article of folks worried that their sunbathing or hot tub time has been observed by the County:
Nichola Schmitz, one of the plaintiffs, said in the lawsuit that a drone hovered over her farm in an surveillance mission that still haunts her. Schmitz, who is deaf, didn't notice the drone until someone else pointed it out to her, at which point she ran inside her bedroom, where she could see the drone photographing the property through her blinds. She said she feared that the drone may have photographed her earlier while nude after bathing.
"This horrible experience has shattered my sense of privacy and security," Schmitz said in the news release. "I'm afraid to open my blinds or go outside to use my hot tub because who knows when the county's drone could be spying on me."
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Suzanne Brock, a second plaintiff, said the county secretly used the drone program to photograph her Sonoma County horse stable and issue code violations. She only discovered the use of the drones after a county employee mentioned they had photos of her property, according to the lawsuit. She then filed a public records request for the images, which left her "stunned" after seeing that the county employees were monitoring her private property including photographing her outdoor bathtub and shower, the lawsuit said.
"[Brock's] shocking realization that the County's drone photographed her outdoor bathtub with a zoom lens, haunts her today whenever she walks her property or tends to her animals," the lawsuit said.
SF Gate
Previously:
• Amazon's Ring surveillance doorbell leaks its customers' home addresses, linked to their doorbell videos
• FBI surveillance van from the 1980s on eBay
