Who said anything about private property? I'm talking about following someone on public streets.
The drone hovers directly over the sidewalk in front of your house. When you step onto the sidewalk, it follows you directly to the front of your workplace. As you go up to the third floor, it hovers up and observes you through the window. As you descend and come back out to the street, it hovers overhead until you arrive back to your home.
It's all plain view doctrine. Not sure what could be ambiguous about this.
The Supreme Court has already held in three cases that air surveillance, even from an altitude as low as 400 feet, does not constitute a search: California v. Ciraolo (1986), Dow Chemical Co. v. United States (1986), and Florida v. Riley (1989).
> society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period. In this case, for four weeks, law enforcement agents tracked every movement that respondent made in the vehicle he was driving. We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark.
Altitude has nothing to do with it. Completeness and cost of picture does.
You’re citing that concurrence again. While that concurrence supports your argument, it’s not binding legal precedent. Perhaps someday it will be, but not today.
That “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard is just the first step of the analysis and goes into the threshold question of “is this a search?” Because if the answer is “no,” then there’s nothing more to be done, not a search, no warrant needed. But if the answer is “yes,” that’s not an automatic win, it doesn’t mean a warrant is needed yet, because there are further analytical steps down the chain.
Also, the court has still not subjected the specific question against the Katz test. If they did, they’d might agree that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public travels. On the other hand, they might not.
I think you should consult a local attorney, because you’re not really understanding what the legal impact of these cases is, and I think a deep discussion with an subject matter expert in person would improve your understanding a lot.
It's fine to realize that you stepped into this conversation wanting to say "this isn't settled law" but somehow positioned yourself as defending the person insisting "this is settled law."
Perhaps your aversion to perceived dickishness made you misread the situation.
