By Vanguard Staff
Key points:
- Plaintiffs claim program involves hundreds of warrantless drone flights over people’s homes, violating privacy rights.
- “This horrible experience has shattered my sense of privacy and security.” – Nichola Schmitz, plaintiff and Sonoma County resident
- “We all have the right to go about our lives in privacy in and around our homes without having to worry about a government drone flying overhead and recording us without a warrant or our knowledge.” – Matt Cagle, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California
SANTA ROSA, CA – The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP filed suit in Sonoma County Superior Court in early June, alleging that the county’s code enforcement agency has operated an illegal drone surveillance program for years.
The plaintiffs claim that the program involves hundreds of warrantless aerial drone flights over people’s homes, violating the California Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and its guarantee of personal privacy.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of longtime Sonoma County residents Nichola Schmitz, Benjamin Verdusco and Suzanne Brock, targets Permit Sonoma’s Code Enforcement Section (CES) and several of its officials. According to the complaint, the agency has conducted more than 700 drone flights since 2019, capturing at least 5,600 images of private properties—often flying as low as 100 feet above the ground, sometimes closer.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to bar the county from flying drones over residents’ properties without first obtaining a judicial warrant.
“We all have the right to go about our lives in privacy in and around our homes without having to worry about a government drone flying overhead and recording us without a warrant or our knowledge,” said Matt Cagle, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
“For too long, Sonoma County code enforcement has used high-powered drones to warrantlessly sift through people’s private affairs and initiate charges that upend lives and livelihoods. All the while, the county has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community and the media.”
Originally launched to monitor unpermitted cannabis cultivation in hard-to-access rural areas, the county’s drone surveillance program has since expanded to include investigations of unrelated civil code violations, including grading issues, unpermitted sheds, junk accumulation and minor zoning infractions.
According to the ACLU’s legal filings, nearly half of the agency’s drone flights in 2024 were unrelated to cannabis enforcement.
Plaintiff Nichola Schmitz, who is deaf and lives with her family on a rural Sonoma County farm, said she only became aware of a drone hovering above her property on Oct. 10, 2023, when a visitor pointed it out to her. “This horrible experience has shattered my sense of privacy and security,” Schmitz said. “I’m afraid to open my blinds or go outside to use my hot tub because who knows when the county’s drone could be spying on me.”
Schmitz lives with her deaf mother and son and works as the executive director of an animal sanctuary. The drone hovered near her bedroom window and above her fenced patio and hot tub, where she sometimes bathes. Metadata from the drone flight shows the craft descended to just 135 feet above her home.
A notice of violation was later placed on her gate, citing illegal grading and an unpermitted dwelling—her late father’s cabin, built in 1981. Schmitz spent $25,000 to address the grading issue and faces nearly $10,000 in fines related to the shed. The county has also placed a lien on her property and threatened legal action.
The lawsuit alleges that the county’s drone program violates Article I, Section 1 of the California Constitution, which protects the right to privacy, and Article I, Section 13, which guards against warrantless searches. It cites the 1985 California Supreme Court decision in People v. Cook, which held that warrantless aerial surveillance of a person’s home and curtilage is unconstitutional. Drones, the complaint argues, are far more invasive than the manned aircraft considered in that case. Sonoma County’s DJI Matrice drones are equipped with high-powered zoom and thermal cameras capable of capturing fine details from hundreds of feet away.
Another plaintiff, Benjamin Verdusco, was surveilled twice in 2021 and 2022 at a property outside Santa Rosa, where his family often gathered and hosted pool parties. The drone captured images of his fenced yard and pool. Verdusco later discovered that county inspectors had used the drone photos to initiate an inspection, resulting in a $6,000 fine for having more than six CBD hemp plants. Verdusco said the uncertainty surrounding how the county obtained evidence created fear and confusion. Ultimately, his family decided to sell the property at a loss. “They were exhausted from the stress and distrust that CES’s warrantless drone surveillance imposed on their lives,” the complaint states.
The third plaintiff, Suzanne Brock, owns a rural horse stable north of Sebastopol. On May 2, 2024, county inspectors flew a drone over her six-acre property and used zoom cameras to capture detailed images of her outdoor bathtub and shower area, enclosed by a six-foot fence. Brock said she only became aware of the surveillance months later, after viewing the drone photos at Permit Sonoma’s office. “So you were droning my bathtub?” she asked one official, who reportedly shrugged and gave no response. Since then, Brock has stopped using her outdoor bath and described feeling uneasy and watched on her own property.
Jonathan P. Schneller, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, said, “These protections are more important than ever today, as drones make it cheaper and easier for government agencies to pry into people’s lives, invade the sanctity of their homes, and upend their finances.”
According to the ACLU, the county’s internal correspondence and drone policy documents show that officials were aware of the constitutional issues but chose not to adopt proposed language that would have limited surveillance over areas with a reasonable expectation of privacy.
In a 2022 email, code enforcement supervisor Jesse Cablk said, “I think that we should leave out language of warrants,” and admitted that the agency surveils “residences, yards, enclosures, sheds, greenhouses, etc.”
The lawsuit also claims that county officials have systematically concealed the existence of the drone program from the public, the press and the courts. Notices of violation rarely disclose that the evidence was obtained via drone, and affected residents are often left guessing how the county obtained its information.
The ACLU argues that the program represents an unprecedented scale of local government surveillance, using advanced tools with little oversight and no judicial authorization.
Between 2020 and 2024, the county levied more than $3 million in fines in cannabis-related cases that involved drone surveillance, according to the complaint. In one non-cannabis case involving junkyard conditions, fines exceeded $150,000.
The ACLU also warned that unless restrained by the courts, other jurisdictions across California may replicate Sonoma County’s model of aerial surveillance.
The plaintiffs are seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, an order requiring the county to obtain a warrant before conducting future drone surveillance, and a halt to taxpayer funding of the program.
The ACLU said the lawsuit seeks to restore a “basic constitutional principle: when the government wants to search people’s homes and invade their private lives, it must first obtain a warrant.”
The full complaint is available here.
If California was serious about creating “affordable housing”, they’d find some way other than increasing property taxes via the use of drones. (That’s really what this is about, along with the violation money they collect.)
If you want to tax property (e.g., instead of basing it on income) – tax the land instead of the structures that provide housing.
Though truth be told, I’d provide property tax BREAKS, if the ill-advised subdivisions in semi-rural areas like this were “reconsolidated” into the larger parcels that they formerly-were, in prior decades.
Sort of like a more-aggressive Williamson Act.
I wonder if I can win on that platform, if I ever get into a position of power?
Of course, this would result in an overall reduction of property taxes, so the organizations which already collect it at current levels wouldn’t like it – to say the least. (Mostly consisting of oversized school districts.)
In any case, I’ve seen a LOT of parcels that shouldn’t have been subdivided in areas such as this one, and that process started a long time ago – well before the latest incarnation of the developer activists (YIMBYs).