This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 5th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When the police put a drone in the air to surveil an area for days or weeks at a time your rights are implicated.

In Baltimore, a federal appeals court has said the city's persistent aerial surveillance

program is unconstitutional.

Cato's Matthew Feeney details what that means for other police data. constitutional. technology that may or may not be consequential with respect to constitutional rights, but from the perspective of police allows them to do their jobs a lot easier.

Arial surveillance is one of them.

Baltimore is a city that has adopted it

in the wake of Freddie Gray.

I know they used a great deal of it

for covering, providing data on protests as they were unfolding.

What have federal courts now said?

Most recently the Fourth Circuit was heard a case dealing with Baltimore's aerial surveillance program and

they ruled that it violated the Fourth Amendment which protects against

unreasonable searches and seizures.

This is an interesting decision, it seems to me,

because the case that the Fourth Circuit relied on

actually didn't ostensibly have anything to do with aerial surveillance.

The Supreme Court in the past, in a string of cases from the 1980s did address

aerial surveillance. They were looking at cases involving surveillance from airplanes and

helicopters usually associated with marijuana growing. But those weren't the cases that the

Fourth Circuit considered. In fact, the Fourth Circuit in reaching its conclusion that this persistent

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