Lawsuit claims Sonoma County's drone surveillance program has gone beyond its normal limits

CBS News

4 hours ago

From data breaches to license plate readers to the uncertainty of AI, the idea of personal privacy is being lost in our high-tech world. But now, a lawsuit claims that Sonoma County's drone surveillance program has gone way beyond normal limits.
In 2019, Sonoma County authorized the purchase of a drone. It was intended to help identify illegal cannabis grows in remote areas, but since then, there has been a lot of "mission creep."
"When I saw the drone, I was walking around this side. And I saw the drone over me, and I listened," said Saadi Vega, imitating its sound. "I'm really confused and scared because I see the drone close to me. I can see the drone."
Vega works at the Cloven Hoof Farm, an animal rescue facility and home owned by Nichola Schmitz Nichola is deaf, but it wasn't hard to see the drone hovering over her backyard.
"I noticed something flying around," she said, through her interpreter, Ana. "It was pretty big. It was actually very big. And I thought, 'Hey, what's up?'"
The drone is a large professional model about three feet across, made by DJI. It costs about $25,000 and can zoom in and even follow moving objects autonomously.
It's the property of the county's code enforcement division, which makes sure that people's property conforms to local ordinances and is properly permitted.
But the American Civil Liberties Union says the drone program is out of control, and they have filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nichola and two other property owners for illegally monitoring and recording the private spaces of their homes.
"So, these are areas in their backyards, in their pools, in their hot tubs. And there is California law that makes this illegal," said Shilpi Agarwal, Legal Director for ACLU of Northern California. "They have been using this drone program for this large category of code enforcement--not just cannabis grows--but what they profess to be a whole swath of code violations. But they haven't told people that this is what they're doing."
It was a year and a half later that the ACLU contacted Nichola to tell her that her home had been surveilled by the county. She had been blaming the neighbors for the intrusion.
In the lawsuit, the lawyers quote documents allegedly showing a code enforcement supervisor trying to keep the program free from restrictions when crafting the drone policy.
"I think that we should leave out language of warrants," it said. "I am concerned about reasonable expectations of privacy, as we do look at residences, yards, enclosures, sheds, greenhouses, etc.... We do not just stick to open fields when conducting our investigations."
"The fact that Sonoma County is doing this without a warrant should really worry all of us," said attorney Agarwal, "because it really suggests that Sonoma County is really getting into, they're invading the core of what our privacy rights are meant to protect, which is our ability to act freely in our own homes without being surveilled by the government."
Nichola's surveillance stemmed from a permitting dispute over her adding dirt to her backyard because of erosion following the 2017 Nuns Fire. But no one from the county ever told her they had taken pictures of her home from the sky.
"I thought, this is a violation," Nichola said. "This is a private house, my haven. If I don't say anything about this situation, it could get worse and worse. And they could sneak into other people's lives and spy on them. There are no boundaries. They can come into my space. They could be anywhere. I want to stop this."
The county responded to our request for comment with a statement saying they would not talk about the litigation but are reviewing the complaint and are taking the allegations "very seriously." Whether the lawsuit will bring changes is unknown at this point. But even if it does, Nichola said she will never again feel the same sense of security in her home that she once did.