Surveillance

Can Vehicles be Criminal Voyeurs?

mdecrow@maine.edu Article, Blog , , ,

Can Vehicles be Criminal Voyeurs?

Rebecca Hatt

 

New vehicles come equipped with cameras and microphones that surveil the exterior, and often the interior, of the car in the name of safety and interactivity.[1] Some cameras only help with parking, however, many go much further than that.[2] For instance, Tesla’s exterior cameras surveil the outside of the car in Sentry mode, on the lookout for vandals or collisions, and the interior cabin cameras are known to record on impact and to monitor for attentiveness while using supervised features.[3] The theory is that these cameras help protect against damage, theft, and unsupervised use.[4] While these are laudable goals, the theoretical intention and the opt-in model of data sharing isn’t enough to escape state voyeurism laws in states like Maine.[5] In Maine, a person is guilty of violation of privacy if that person intentionally installs or uses in a “private place without the consent of the person or persons entitled to privacy in that place, any device for observing, photographing, recording, amplifying or broadcasting sounds or events in that place.”[6] When these vehicles, or those equipped with after-market dashcams, are parked in private garages, or used for private purposes in such a way that activity in them would normally be private, the recording conflicts with a person’s reasonable expectations of privacy, and with this criminal statute. An opt-in from the driver is not sufficient to allow the vehicle to breach the privacy of others under the law, and even if the driver sought to obtain consent from every passenger or passerby, some people are not able to give legal consent. Despite the impossibility, car makers like Tesla include disclaimers that “[i]t is your sole responsibility to consult and comply with all local regulations and property restrictions regarding the use of cameras.”[7] So when a child is changing at the back of the car using towels or a Car Cabana to provide privacy, who’s watching, how do we know, and who does the law protect?[8]

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The Blueprint for a Civil Rights Lawsuit against Government Surveillance Contractors Introduction

mdecrow@maine.edu Article, Paper , , , ,

The Blueprint for a Civil Rights Lawsuit against Government Surveillance Contractors

John Blegen

 

Introduction

In March of 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel, while speaking before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence made a brazen admission. When asked by Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, whether the FBI purchases Cell Phone Location Data from internet advertisers, Patel replied:

“We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”

Ron Wyden replied that if true, this practice by the FBI would constitute “an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment [that is] particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information.”[1]

This FBI practice is not just an “outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment,” but an outright violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to privacy against unwarranted government surveillance.

In Carpenter, the Supreme Court held that it is illegal for the government to access cell phone location data information without a warrant.[2] Carpenter mentions no exception to this rule for information that has been purchased from wireless carriers or data brokers. It is not the property rights wireless carriers possess over this information that the Fourth Amendment protects; it is the right to privacy against unchecked government surveillance as ensured by the Constitution.

Patel’s argument would be the same as saying, the government is free to pay a private thug to break into a suspect’s apartment and acquire his wardrobe, or his private collection of firearms, or his diary, or any other piece of evidence without a warrant, so long as they do not do so themselves. It is a brazen admission of the FBI’s intent to not follow the Constitution.[3]

What allows Patel to be brazen enough to make such a statement is the fact that there currently exists no legal mechanism by which the public can validate their right to privacy against government surveillance. This is the case due to decades of congressional lethargy on the issue of data and tech surveillance, as well as the Federal Trade Commission’s refusal to enforce what little data protection laws do exist.[4]

It is also the result of years of the Supreme Court hollowing out plaintiffs’ ability to bring lawsuits against the federal government for violations of the Constitution.[5]  Such civil suits may be brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which allows suits against states for actions taken in violation of individuals’ Federal Rights, and Bivens actions, which are the equivalent of a 1983 lawsuit against the federal government.

This paper contends that 1983 actions could provide a fruitful method for individuals to validate their right to privacy and push privacy forward against government surveillance, as well as third-party surveillance conducted by AI-surveillance companies like Palantir, which synthesizes mass amounts of data from across various sources into one “fusion” profile and Clearview AI, which provides facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, both at the state and federal level.

As I will explain below, Section 1983 is an effective tool to limit both these private companies and the government because precedent has held that government contractors may also be subject to a Section 1983 lawsuit when they are performing government functions.

This paper also examines Bivens actions, with the caveat that Bivens law has been deeply neutered by Supreme Court precedent, making it effectively impossible to bring a lawsuit against the federal government for violation of federal rights, even though 1983 allows the same to be done against the states – as implausible as that sounds.

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Implications of New School Surveillance Methods on Student Data Privacy, National Security, Electronic Surveillance, and the Fourth Amendment

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Implications of New School Surveillance Methods on Student Data Privacy, National Security, Electronic Surveillance, and the Fourth Amendment

By Amanda Peskin, University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law, Class of 2024

Abstract

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, schools have escalated their use of educational technology to improve students’ in-school and at-home learning. Although educational technology has many educational benefits for students, it has serious implications for students’ data privacy rights. Not only does using technology for educational practices allow schools to surveil their students, but it also avails students to data collection by the educational technology companies. This paper discusses the legal background of surveilling and monitoring student activity, provides the implications surveillance has on technology, equity, and self-expression, and offers several policy-based improvements to better protect students’ data privacy.

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Disclosure of Teen’s Facebook Messages Should be a Red Flag for Us All

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Blog

By Will Simpson, Class of 2025

Amidst the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision on June 24, 2022, to overturn the cornerstone abortion case of 1973, Roe v. Wade, a privacy issue has surfaced: the extent to which digital data can be used against us to prosecute novel forms of criminalized behaviors. To make matters worse, tech giants such as Facebook and Google—who collect and largely control this data—are legally obligated to assist governments with this invasive practice.

Why should we care? While the Fourth Amendment helps protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, private companies are not restricted from archiving our digital data. As a result, the details of our online lives are preserved for potential access by government warrants. Continue reading →