Brian A. Weikel
Volume 75, Issue 2, 505-554
Surveillance cameras are increasingly used by the public and law enforcement to prevent and
prosecute criminal activity. Individuals and companies can grant law enforcement access to
private cameras for both live monitoring feeds and recorded footage, thereby creating a quasipublic
network of private cameras. According to the third-party doctrine, the government can
access all information from these surveillance cameras without a subpoena or warrant and
without infringing upon Fourth Amendment privacy protections. However, as technology
advances and the prevalence of surveillance cameras rises, this per se rule fails to account for
one’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the public and private spheres.
This Note examines the 2022 San Francisco ordinance, which authorizes the government to use
private cameras in a wide variety of circumstances. Specifically, it reviews the ordinance through
the mosaic theory, whose proponents champion as a necessary correction to the erosion of Fourth
Amendment rights and whose opponents condemn as doctrinally flawed and impractical to
administer. To address the theory’s doctrinal shortcomings, this Note reviews the historical
development of privacy protections with each new technology considered by the Supreme Court.
To demonstrate how the theory may be applied to other technologies, this Note analyzes the circuit
court split on whether the warrantless use of pole cameras constitutes a search under the Fourth
Amendment. Pole cameras serve as a useful proxy for private cameras under the ordinance.
Ultimately, this Note recommends that the San Francisco ordinance be modified to safeguard an
individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy by adding a notice requirement with camera
stickers and adjacent signs, requiring police officers to provide camera owners with a brief
descriptive justification for each requested video, and limiting the duration of access to live and
historical feeds for each event.