Fed Court Denies Expedited Review of Ruling Allowing Baltimore Cops to Continue Mass Aerial Surveillance of its Mostly Black Population 12 Hrs a Day, Every Day Until at Least September

The Daily Record writes that A federal appeals court has rejected a request from civil rights groups that it expedite its consideration of their constitutional challenge to the Baltimore Police Department’s use of aerial surveillance to fight crime in the city. Without comment, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said this week that it will not hear before September arguments.

The ACLU’s brief states as follows:

the Baltimore Police Department (“BPD”) will begin to deploy aircraft to circle above Baltimore as part of a comprehensive system of long-term, persistent, wide-area aerial surveillance that will cover more than 90 percent of the city, recording second-by-second the movements of Baltimore’s 600,000 residents. This warrantless mass surveillance system presents a radical and society-changing threat to individual privacy and to free association, and it violates the Constitution.

There is no factual dispute about what this system, which the BPD calls the “Aerial Investigation Research” or “AIR” program, will do. For 180 days, three aircraft equipped with high-definition cameras will fly above Baltimore for 12 hours each day, stopping only at night and in bad weather—an estimated 80 hours per week. Their purpose is to help the BPD identify specific individuals who are suspected of committing or witnessing serious crimes, as well as those who cross their paths before and after the crimes took place. While the cameras will not capture people’s physical characteristics, they will record, second-by-second, the movements of virtually all of Baltimore’s residents. The BPD will retain a rolling log of those movements for 45 days before aging off older data. To put this pervasive surveillance program into practice, the BPD has signed a contract with a private corporation, candidly called “Persistent Surveillance Systems” (“PSS”). The contract describes the work that PSS will do at the BPD’s direction to record and track the movements of Baltimore’s residents; to link that information to other BPD-operated surveillance systems (including ground-based video cameras and automatic license plate readers); and to deliver reports to the BPD that comprehensively detail the movements of individuals who have been in the vicinity of crime scenes—and the movements of everyone those individuals have met.

The BPD’s system is the largest mass surveillance program ever implemented in an American city. The system puts into place an expansive surveillance dragnet, giving the BPD access to a comprehensive record of the movements and activities of every Baltimore resident each time they leave their home. “[T]his newfound tracking capacity runs against everyone,” “not
just . . . persons who might happen to come under investigation.” Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206, 2218 (2018). By using advanced technology to aggregate location data over the long term, without a warrant, the AIR program offends the bedrock protections for a free society that the Constitution has long provided.

This Court should not allow Baltimore’s novel mass surveillance system to become a chilling and all-seeing part of daily life in this country. The program’s objectives to reduce crime and violence in Baltimore are laudable—indeed, that is one of the central aims of Plaintiffs’ own work. But the Constitution dictates that the use of the BPD’s indiscriminate and warrantless aerial dragnet is not an available solution to Baltimore’s ills. For the reasons that follow, the Court should reverse the district court and remand with instructions that it enter a preliminary injunction to halt this program. [MORE]