They Know Where You’ve Been: IJ Fights Norfolk’s New Surveillance Network

In 2023, Norfolk, Virginia—home of the world’s largest naval base—quietly unveiled a sprawling surveillance network that can track the city’s entire driving population. Now IJ clients Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington are fighting to protect their privacy—and yours.

Lee Schmidt, a husband and father, recently retired from a two-decade career in the Navy. Norfolk is his home: It’s where he attends church, shoots at the range, and raises his kids. The Norfolk area is also home to mother and entrepreneur Crystal Arrington, who lives in nearby Portsmouth. As an eldercare aide, Crystal drives into Norfolk daily to help her clients get to grocery stores, doctor’s appointments, and anywhere else they need to go.

So Lee and Crystal were shocked to find out that, with little fanfare, Norfolk had partnered with a tech company called Flock to install a surveillance dragnet. Flock describes itself as “a tech company eliminating crime,” offering a suite of options to local governments so that law enforcement officials can “stop wasting valuable time hunting for evidence.”

Norfolk’s 172 cameras are placed strategically so that, as the police chief bluntly explains, “It would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” The cameras capture the license plate of every passing vehicle. Flock then uploads the images to a database, where they are run through an algorithm to create a unique “Vehicle Fingerprint” that allows law enforcement to go back in time and create maps of where people have been, where they tend to drive, and even who they tend to meet up with.

Let’s be clear: Lee and Crystal haven’t done anything wrong. They’re not wanted by the police or under suspicion of any crime. But Flock still studiously logs their comings and goings, just like it does for every driver. And not just in Norfolk; with Flock cameras in over 5,000 communities, anyone with access to the system can keep tabs on nearly any driver, anywhere in the nation. Nor is this threat hypothetical. Multiple officials in Kansas, for instance, used Flock’s system to stalk their ex-partners. 

None of this is reasonable or constitutional. One of the major reasons for the American Revolution was British officials’ use of so-called general warrants to conduct arbitrary and blanket searches of the colonists. This “curtain of technology,” as Norfolk’s police chief calls it, gives modern officials that same power—one that the Fourth Amendment was designed to curtail. 

Fourth Amendment law, while imperfect, has tried to keep up with technological advances in order to protect our rights. Though courts tend to find that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they briefly appear in public, that principle does not extend to round-the-clock monitoring made possible by modern technology. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court held that officials had to get a warrant based on probable cause before they could subpoena seven days of historical location data from a cell phone carrier. In 2021, the 4th Circuit held that ongoing aerial surveillance over the city of Baltimore was unconstitutional. 

The concern in both cases was that tracking people’s locations over time, even in public, would allow the government to learn intimate details about a person’s life—from habits to religion to health to relationships—that would otherwise be impossible to know without effectively stalking that person. The courts have made clear that such power cannot be used without judicial oversight. 

In other words, if the city wants to track specific individuals, it can do what the police have always done: get a warrant. 

With this lawsuit, the newest case in IJ’s Project on the Fourth Amendment, Lee and Crystal hope to ground Norfolk’s unconstitutional surveillance—and send a strong signal to other cities nationwide.

Tahmineh Dehbozorgi is an IJ attorney.