This week, three people filed a lawsuit against Sonoma County, seeking to prevent code enforcement from deploying drones to take aerial photographs of their homes, which the American Civil Liberties Union describes as a “runaway spying operation.”
The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of the three residents on Wednesday, alleging that the county began using drones with high-powered cameras and zoom lenses in 2019 to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but that officials have used the devices more than 700 times since then to find other code violations on private property without first obtaining a warrant.
“For far too long, Sonoma County code enforcement has used high-powered drones to unlawfully sift through people’s private affairs and file charges that disrupt lives and livelihoods.” “The county has kept these illegal searches hidden from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media,” Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a statement.
A spokesman for Sonoma agency stated that the agency is evaluating the complaint and takes “the allegations very seriously.”
The case comes amid a nationwide debate about the use of drones by government agencies, which have grown increasingly reliant on the unmanned aircraft for disaster relief, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. Recently, some agencies in California and other states have considered deploying drones to investigate code enforcement violations.
According to data in the complaint, roughly half of Sonoma County’s drone flights in 2024 were non-cannabis offences such as unpermitted building, scrapyard conditions, and zoning violations.
“The use of drones over someone’s private space raises questions about what is considered private,” said Ari Ezra Waldman, a law professor at UC Irvine.
Waldman stated that if law enforcement on the ground wishes to view over a towering fence or trees into someone’s property, they either obtain the person’s agreement or have reasonable cause for a warrant. “Why shouldn’t that apply above ground too?” he said.
California does not have a statute governing the use of drones by code enforcement officials.
In 2015, members in the state Assembly passed legislation that would have limited the use of drones over private property without the owner’s consent. The bill was vetoed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who expressed concern that it could subject hobbyists or commercial users to “burdensome litigation.”
The ACLU claims that the county’s use of drones as an investigation tool violates the California Constitution, which guarantees people’s right to privacy and protection against excessive searches and seizures.
“I think that our expectations of privacy are based on social norms and people don’t normally expect that someone is going to have a super high powered, detailed ability to capture extraordinary detail with a camera that’s just buzzing over their property,” according to Waldman. “We shouldn’t have to walk around life expecting that just because this technology exists that we have no privacy from anything anymore, from any direction.”
The lawsuit also claims that the county’s drone policy has eased over the last few years. In 2019, the regulation required inspectors to receive a complaint about a property before deploying a drone. Officials now have no such necessity, allowing them to conduct “discretionary proactive investigations,” according to the complaint.
