Napolitano warns freedom-stifling consequences of drones monitoring innocent citizens in name of safety
April 23, 2020
Responding to the growing Orwellian trend of the authorities using surveillance technology to enforce social distancing protocols, Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said bluntly Thursday that such enforcement methods are illegal.
“We’re not talking about a bank robber running out of a bank because there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime, and you don’t need a search warrant to watch him,” he said during an appearance on FNC’s “Fox & Friends.”
What “we are talking about,” he continued, is using drone technology, as an example, to watch “people peaceably walking down the street or assembling in a public space.”
And that is both Orwellian and frightening, not to mention illegal.
“Use of a drone to watch them and to monitor their body temperature and their heart rate is obviously a search under the Fourth Amendment,” the judge continued.
“The Supreme Court has said using drones, period, is a search. Those cases were written before this technology existed to monitor heart rates and body temperature. And searches can’t be done without a search warrant.”
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