In what it calls a “runaway spying operation,” the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit last week accusing Sonoma County of conducting warrantless drone surveillance over rural homes — violating residents’ constitutional right to privacy and levying millions in fines based on illegally obtained footage.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Sonoma County Superior Court in collaboration with law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP, targets the county’s Code Enforcement Section (CES), its parent agency, and several key officials. It demands the county cease its use of drones to monitor private property without first obtaining a warrant, as required by the California Constitution.
The ACLU alleges that CES’s drone program, originally launched six years ago to identify unpermitted cannabis grows in hard-to-reach areas, has ballooned into an unchecked surveillance system used to track a wide range of alleged code violations — often without residents ever knowing they were being watched…