- Hello, my name is Wes Bearden, and this presentation is called Surveillance, Social Media, and Spying, part two. This is the second part of a two-part-series, I hope you had a chance to listen to the first part. As I've said before, my name's Wes Bearden, and I am a attorney that practices in Dallas, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm also the Chairman of the Board for Bearden Investigative Agency, which is a nationwide private investigation agency that typically deals in these types of issues. As you remember, in the first hour, we really talked about and spent quite a bit of time on the Wiretap Act, or the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and we did that really for the idea of understanding that that has been a piece of privacy law that is really from a statutory scheme lasted almost 50 years now, it's worked quite well, and so today we're gonna go over some other areas, as I mentioned at the beginning of the first hour, and I'll mention again, this is a wide wide area of law. You could spend a lot of time in each one of these areas, really ferreting out some of the more peculiar of the rules. What I've tried to do here today is really hit some of the highlights that you have an idea of some of the pitfalls if you conduct investigations within your cases. Again, I try to concentrate mostly on civil litigation cases, as you'll see here, there are some Fourth Amendment cases that we're going to have some issues, and some good rules to grab from, but that's what I've tried to do throughout this next hour, in this case law. Now, as you can see here, one of the things that I've tried to do is compare The Wiretap Act to several of the below schemes that we'll go through today. For instance, we're gonna talk about computer traipsing if you will, entering the computer of another individual to obtain information. One of the things I'll tell you right now to try to take out the surprise is that really a lot of the statutory law, at least on the Federal level, doesn't do what we want it to do. We'll talk about that in a minute. We'll talk about trash, and how common investigative method that is. And when you can pick that up from opposing party or witnesses' house, use what's been thrown away in the garbage as evidence at a hearing or trial. We'll talk about the common law tort of invasion of privacy very briefly, although that in itself is a topic and a tort that we could probably spend an entire law school semester of. Then we'll spend some time on the tracking devices, and what those look like today, some issues in social media, a little bit on drones, and then finally some facial and license plate recognition technology that is now coming about. As you can see when I've, and I've mentioned this before in the first hour is that these schemes are both statutory and common law. Your invasion of privacy really is a constitutional right. We've had some delegation of that right after a Roe V. Wade has been overturned, but it is constitutional, it also exists in common law, and it also exists in various statutory schemes across a wide area. And part of the reason this area of law is a little bit difficult because it encompasses so much. Well, let's start with the first thing, and that is the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act is part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but I'm not going to spend the time or the detail at the granular level that I did in the first hour on the Wiretap Act. And there's a reason for that, because the Stored Communication Act doesn't do what we want it to do. If you read the Stored Communication Act, it, at least when you come away from it, you initially think, "Well, okay, "what I really want the Federal Government to do "is say that everything that's in my computer", of course, when I say computer now, I mean my watch or my phone or whatever other device, because that is a computer, "is basically protected, "and off limits from everyone else." And the reality is that's not the case. If you really read the Stored Communication Act and look here, it prohibits the access of, and this is kind of the critical language, any temporary immediate storage of wire or electronic communication, incidental to the electronic transmission thereof, and any storage of any communication or electronic communication service for the purposes of backup protection of such communication. Well, that's a mouthful, but if you think about it, it's not too terribly difficult under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, what are we really protecting there, again in the Wiretap Act? Well, we're protecting the communication, right? We're not protecting the property, we're not protecting the computer, we're protecting the privacy of the communication from one individual to another, and that we have all sorts of exceptions in terms of consent. And the Stored Communication Act is doing similar to the same thing from an electronic communications perspective. It's really protecting the electronic communication where it is stored for a very temporary part of time. Now I don't want to get into all the SCA completely, because, again, it doesn't do what you really want it to do. And I point you to some areas that will do perhaps what you want it to do. But as you can see from the two cases reported below, Garcia versus City of Laredo is really, I believe an employment dispute, it's not necessarily a criminal defense case or a Fourth Amendment case. It is an employment dispute where the court here in the Fifth Circuit said the Stored Communication Act doesn't protect the files that are in your mobile phone. Well, think about that and look at the paragraph above it. Any temporary or immediate storage of wire or electronic communication. Basically what they're talking about there is when your communication email leaves from your computer and touches the other machines, and I'm doing a very basic explanation of email, but touches other machines before it reaches its end destination, the touching of the other machines and where that's stored, whether that's on a Gmail system, or Hotmail, or a Outlook or whatever you have, that's the area that is protected by the Stored Communications Act basically, okay? It doesn't protect the downloaded files that may or may be on your machine or may not be on your machine. Now, of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the statutory scheme, as I've mentioned before, your relationship can depend on your privacy rights. One of those relationships is with the police, or with the government actor. And of course that's what this Riley versus California, a Supreme Court case, it basically says you still have to have a warrant to get into a digital data inventory search if they find your cell phone in your car, for instance. So if the Stored Communication Act doesn't work, what might? Well, before we talk about that, let's talk about, there are specific times when you might have a Stored Communication Act issue. And the best thing that I can explain that to you with is a key logger case. Now, key logger's a pretty old technology, but it's still a very dangerous technology that exists out there, and a key logger, what that is, is it's a device that sits between your keyboard and your machine, and basically records everything that you type into the machine. Now, a key logger's not a contemporaneous monitoring of your communications, right? It's just capturing your key strokes into your machine, capturing your passwords usually, the nerdy well individual come back and grab the key logger, take it back, and then look and see what you've typed in for passwords or usernames or whatnot. And these two cases here are two cases and different relationships that show you the limits of the SCA, the Stored Communications Act. The first one is Renee versus Fishers. In short, this is a lady who is currently working at a location and her coworkers have decided to spy on her. So they use a key logger basically, and that we're using key loggers in both these cases, you can see one is an 08, one's 11, but if you look down at the end here, this Luis V. Zang is a 2018 spyware, which is a lot more common these days, but it's the same result, same analysis basically. But anyways, as she used it, as her employer, coworkers basically began to spy on her using a key logger, they grab her pass codes to get onto her internet email, and then also onto her internet bank account portal that she has with, let's say, Bank of America or somebody like that. And what the court finds here is that the key logger itself is not covered in the Stored Communications Act, 'cause it doesn't contemporaneously intercept the message. Remember, we're concerned with the transmission, and the ownership of the message between two parties, which is what the SCA does. So you would not have any liability with use of the key logger. However, under the SCA, however, once they got that information, then they took it and they accessed certain online systems, predominantly her email, which did have internet information that was stored by internet telecommunications provider, and that access itself resulted in liability. So it is a little bit complicated here what the SCA actually does, and it's very limited, I think the key takeaway is that it doesn't do what you want it to do. Now the family relationship is the exact same thing, this is a divorce, husband places a key logger scheme on the ex-wife's machine, court holds that doesn't violate The Wiretap Act, or the state Wiretap Act, but it did violate the Stored Communications Act and possibly an invasion of privacy action, because they used the information to get onto another email provider, okay? Again, this is only the statutory scheme. One of the things we'll talk about here in a minute is the tort of invasion of privacy, and as you see, that is such a large tort, that much of this activity would be caught up in it for civil liability as its own. So I think the key, again, out of all of the Stored Communications Act is frankly, this doesn't do what we want it to do nine times out of 10, there are some cases that it does, but very rarely. What you do do get is several state statutes, state penal code statutes that may actually accomplish what you're trying to do if you're trying to prosecute somebody, whether civilly or criminally for unauthorized access to a computer, and these statutes differ so much between state to state, that it's hard to have some common denominator to talk about. I've included some of the names of the statutes, because they are a little bit unique. Use of numbers really deals with the use of either your passwords and your username to get onto devices or into data storage that you do not have access to. Breach of computer security, maybe something as simple as you are not authorized to be on this computer system, and you are, okay? There are several statutes like that, it doesn't really matter if it's a laptop, doesn't matter if it's an internal system, an intranet, a server-based system, it doesn't matter, as long as you are not authorized to be on there. Now you can imagine there are a number of cases that splinter out from there talking about that in each state. And you really should look at your state statutes, but the purpose of these two or three things is to talk to you about where you really have more liability is in these state statutes than necessarily the federal statute. So try to look at the state statutes, and see kind of what may exist and make sure that you have a really good understanding of that. Now, one of the things that I've mentioned now multiple times, is this idea of invasion of privacy. Invasion of privacy is a common law tort that has multiple areas of it, but multiple types of it, one of those is intrusion upon seclusion. And that's what these three elements here for the restatement second of torts talk about. Now there's other types of invasion of privacy that I'm not going to necessarily get into now, because this is what we typically believe or typically associated with invasion of privacy. For the most part, it's common law, and in a couple of states, it is codified, but if you really look at the codification of it, or the statutory scheme of invasion of privacy in those states, it almost comes down to these three elements at all. And if you really look at these three elements, they're really pretty wide, right? The first is that you've had intruded on the plaintiff's solitude seclusion or private affairs, number two, that it was highly offensive to a reasonable person and three that he got damaged, and that's about it. And so many a times this catchall claim is used all the time in any type of spying or overreach by one private party to another, and is a backup is also quite easy case to get bad summary judgment and move towards the trial, because who are these reasonable people to determine what was highly offensive, who knows? And it's not easy to prosecute, it's not easy to defend necessarily, because it's got very fuzzy elements. The other thing that I would also tell you is invasion of privacy cases, again, I could spend eight hours just talking about different types of cases of invasion of privacy, and they're interesting cases, but they also don't all mesh well together. For instance, if you look at this slide here, it talks about open windows. If you look at these two cases, they're not from the same district or court of appeals here in the state of Texas, but they're close to each other. And the first one's fact pattern is not too terribly different than the second fact pattern, yet they find opposite. And let me provide that to you, in Vaughn, neighbors outside looks across the street, sees his other neighbor, sees his neighbor across the street in front of a plate glass window completely naked. And with the blinds completely pulled open, and he takes a photograph and shows it to everybody in town. Of course, the neighbor who has been photographed is upset and he brings suit. Well, the court in that Vaughn case said, basically, "Listen, you know, "you have to have an expectation of privacy. "It's not reasonable that if you're in your house "with your plate glass windows open "without your clothes on, "that somebody else is not gonna see that, "so we're not gonna find that that's an invasion "at that stage." Okay. Now compare that with Baah versus Fleming. In this case, it's a couple that, gentleman, again, two neighbor cases, gentlemen living next to an individual, and I get the feeling that these are probably two zero lot line type properties. The gentleman takes his camera and tries to shoot in the backyard a dog who is barking. And apparently there's some history with this animal, and there's been multiple complaints to Animal Control. But as he takes his photograph, he takes a photograph of the dog barking and going crazy, or whatever, and in the background, he shoots into the house, probably unknowingly, where his neighbor, who is eight-months-pregnant, is cooking dinner in a nightgown for her husband and kids, and everybody else in the household. There the court says, "Oh, that's definitely an invasion of privacy." Well, how do you square those two? You probably don't. And that's the whole idea of this whole reasonable person standard. It may be that the guy in the first case was probably this old, hairy, not so good looking guy standing in front of a plane glass window, the second case the plaintiff was a eight-month-pregnant pregnant mom and housewife. That could very well be the reason for the difference, but it goes to show you that not all the time are you gonna come out on the same side of the equation here because it is such a jury-centric question. Home computer, or cell. These two cases here are kind of interesting cases. These are invasion of privacy cases, where the first one is a divorce case in New Jersey that had been often quoted, and it was a very interesting case, where they were divorcing, and wife took a household computer, and that is kind of critical understanding what a household computer is. A household computer is any computer where there's not a password protection. And in fact, this was many years ago when AOL was a major player in email. Of course, I don't think anybody has AOL anymore. I'm not even sure if AOL's still around, frankly, but at the time, AOL had a software program where it stored on your hard drive copies of the emails you sent, and copies of the emails you received. Of course, it didn't keep copies that were in intermittent transmission, that would be protected by the Stored Communications Act. These were copies that you stored on your hard drive, so that the internet went out, you could still go look. Outlook, and there are a number of other email program providers have something similar to this. Court here says, "Well, since it was a household computer, "and since it was not password protected, "when wife trifled through her husband's computer here, "and found various messages or documents "that were stored on the hard drive itself, "then we're not gonna find that that was a reasonable "expectation of privacy. "We see, we find that it's not any different "than an unlocked filing cabinet "that was stored in the spare bedroom or something." So and that's what they find here. The second case, it's a little bit different of that is Aaron's, which is a furniture leasing company, and in Aaron's, they actually, Aaron's had a program where they were able to obtain certain information from the hard drive of the computer that they had leased out to someone, it was a rent to own type situation, and they did find an invasion of privacy in that situation, because there was not a household computer, they weren't living together, the relationship had changed. So as you can see, these are kind of separate type cases. Things kind of come out on different sides of the coin, depending on the court, depending on who you're, and the time period, in which you're looking at. Audio recordings. Both of these cases were audio recordings where they held invasion of privacy tork claims up, and the first one is simply put in there, Parkers an interesting case because I think it justifies in a divorce where I believe it was the husband had wiretapped the law office of his wife during their divorce, received something like a million-dollar-judgment, which this is back in, this is an old case, this is 95, a million-dollar-judgment, and on an invasion of privacy claim, that's a huge victory for that, which is now 20, 30 years down the road. The second case is an interesting case too, Miller. When you start talking about how this invasion of privacy works within audio, and Miller, Miller is a case where these two are going through a divorce and they own an art gallery. And so this is a very complicated case, where these two not only live together, but they work together, they have ownership interest together and he does all sorts of things. The husband does all sorts of things that he should not do from installing tracking devices to placing things on the phone that were wiretapping her, basically. I mean, there were all sorts of bad acts that he did. However, what the court here finds, which is kind of remarkable is that they say there are these recordings that this guy makes while they're living together. And these recordings are done while they're living in the same house, and they're arguing, and they're made with a just standardized recorder, and he records his conversations with his soon-to-be ex wife in Texas. Well, again, as we've mentioned, Texas is a one party state, can he not do that and be okay under the statute? And the court says, "Yes, he can." The wiretap statute does not apply, 'cause he himself consented to those recordings. But the court also says "We could also see "that it is an invasion of privacy claim, "because it's not reasonable that she was recorded "out of every conversation in her own home." Now that is kind of unique. That's the first time that I know of where you can have an invasion of privacy tort, but still satisfied the Wiretap Act, if that makes sense. So you're still gonna have liability, even though you followed what the statute says. Now this is only one decision, I don't know how this will extrapolate across the country, but it is an interesting theory. And it's something to really think about. Now, let's talk about how these things have part of what I've done there is just simply gone over the purpose of these invasion of privacy cases is to show you that number one, sometimes don't always, no matter what the case facts are, sometimes you have different results, because the elements are so fuzzy, frankly. As you get into the home computer and the cell phone stuff, it changes, okay? And what we find highly offensive today might not be the same tomorrow. Most of your cell phone stuff, or most of your email today is protected by password upon password upon password or double entry check, most people don't have a home computer anymore, most everybody in their house now has a iPad, their own phone, maybe their laptop for work, all of those things are almost always now either blocked by some type of security, so things have changed, and what's offensive today, and what was offensive then has changed. And even in a statutory scheme that I've told you we could rely on as much as we can, which is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the third set of cases there really you're looking at the court saying, "Well, you can still be held liable for invasion of privacy, "even if you comply with the state act." So it's confusing. And it's even more confusing when you begin to interplay some of these things with some of the cases. The next one that you're looking at is Tanzosh versus Inphoto and Crowl. I've called this one, get off my farm or ranch. If you are east of the Mississippi, it's a farm. If you are west of the Mississippi, it's a ranch. I did not know that until I turned 40, but that's generally what we call it. In this case, it's a, as I understand it, a railroad case where Mr. Tanzosh was injured, and it is an injury case. And so I can see in this case how this happened, but the investigators here are being sued probably amongst other people and probably including the defense council for an invasion of privacy. And if you look at it, what happened is, and I don't think that this photograph here is the photograph of this Pennsylvania farm, but I suspect that that's what Mr. Tanzosh kind of lived at. He had a house, it's probably very difficult to figure out which property is his, which field is his, there are probably rural roads that are paved, and some that are not, I mean, if you live out in the country, everything's not as clear cut as it is with a fence line in the city. And so these investigators went out to do surveillance, and I can tell reading the facts, and being a guy who ran an investigation company for many years, what you had were some defense lawyers who were probably over over aggressive, and probably should have dialed it back a little bit. But these investigators were out there, and they were trying to surveil the plaintiff, at some point in time, they trespassed on the farm to get photos, they interviewed next door neighbors, allegedly gave defamatory statements about the, plaintiff in their neighborhood interviews They also took photographs of the gentleman from what was probably his property at the time. Now what's interesting about this case is it it's a case probably worth printing off and reading because it has a lot of these issues that exist when you're conducting investigations that you really need to be kind of careful about. If you don't know where the property line is, you need to figure that out. If you're being too aggressive, you have a real shot at open you and your client up to substantial liability that you don't need to do. But one of the best parts of this case is that this guy couldn't prove that all the people he saw on his property were investigators. But based on some of the research that he did, some of the neighbors who came to testify based on some good work, he was able to prove that circumstantially it was likely to be an invasion of privacy. And that's ultimately what this case holds is that you can prove invasion of privacy circumstantially. And so it's something to really think about when you have something like this. It's also a good reminder to take it easy. Okay. So we've talked about invasion of privacy, we've talked about computer crimes, now we're gonna talk about trash. Oh, fun, right? But abandoned trash is evidence is something that is used by everybody, reporters, police officers, federal agents, private investigators, and it is extraordinarily useful. It's extraordinarily useful in family law cases to show substance abuse, alcohol, drugs, those type things. I've used it several times in commercial litigation cases, suddenly you've filed, it's particularly useful if you have filed certain discovery and then suddenly your investigator comes back to you, and says, and you asked for the secret memo, and all of a sudden they threw the secret memo out of the trash last night. That can be particularly good thing to do when you coordinate it together. So the first question is, can you use discarded garbage as evidence? And the answer is, yes, this is a Fourth Amendment case, Greenwood versus California, but it's so well-written by justice Sandra Day O'Connor that it is usable by all the parties that I talked about from private investigators to private parties to whoever. And here it says that what this case was about is Greenwood was suspected of selling narcotics and a police officer went and got picked up his trash that was lying on the side of the road during a trash day, he tossed it, he found drug paraphernalia, drug residue, using those two things, he got a warrant to get inside the house, and lo and behold, he found a house that was basically producing, I think it was marijuana or methamphetamine, I don't remember which one, but it was some type of illegal drug, and his arrest, and of course, Greenwood hops up at trial says, "Wait, you can't use any of that. "You should have had a warrant for those trash bags." That was a legal Fourth Amendment legal search and seizure. "And you didn't have a warrant. "And so anything you found in the bag "and any warrant that you got based off that information, "all of that should be kicked out 'under the exclusionary rule.", okay? Well, Sandra Day O'Connor dismisses that pretty quickly. And she says, "Well, society doesn't necessarily accept "reasonable respondent's claim to an expectation of privacy "in trash left for collection in an area "accessible to the public." Basically she says that when you abandon certain things, particularly on the curtilage of your residence, we'll talk about curtilage in a minute, that you've basically given up any ownership interest in that material, and it's not unreasonable for somebody to come by and pick it up and take it. She also uses this language here that is quite well, but it says the method, Fourth Amendment case, the court clearly indicates that the method is used by others, journalists, investigators, police, scavenger, snoops, and that by depositing their garbage in an area, particularly suited for public inspection, and public consumption for the express purpose of having strangers take it. So not only does she, this case and its progeny really hit the nail in the head for police officers, but through this big debate to basically reaffirms it for everybody else. Now, one of the issues that I've always heard about, and I mentioned here really is that when it's outside on the curtilage of the residence, and we really don't have a good definition of curtilage, there's one here, but in this United States versus Dunn case that says the area that harbors the intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man's home and the privies of life. Well, what does that mean? The curtilage in Manhattan is different than in West Virginia, than in California, than in a subdivision of Chicago. It's not the same. We live in all sorts of different areas. Is it like the farm or ranch that we just saw? Is it like the zero lot line property that we talked about, or is it like a apartment complex? It's hard to talk to determine, but generally, the court has said it generally turns on public accessibility to the trash, and this is something I find police officers are always worried about. Where is the curtilage? Where can I go and get the trash? Well, in the next set of cases here that you see starting with the United States versus Jackson, there probably is a wider limit or liberality to what curtilage might be than what I would allow, as somebody who ran an investigation company for many years and is still involved in it, generally the way we would do this is the investigator would be out in the field, sometimes at two or three in the morning, we take a photograph and send it to a young associate attorney who would then have to say, "Okay, you can go pick the trash up at that house "or that office or that industrial facility "or whatever it is." But if you read these, they tend to go a little bit further. So the first one is policying a trash can adjacent to a sidewalk, okay, I would agree with that, I think that probably is outside of the curtilage, and it's probably evidence of abandonment. Placing a dumpster that hundreds of people have access to, like an apartment complex. Okay, I would agree with that. Investigators entry into a fenced area to pull the trash, well in this Reed case, he said, "Okay, I'm not sure that I would agree with that", but obviously very rarely do you find the courts pooh pooing that it was outside within the outside of the curtilage area, and that was protected near the house. These two cases are two cases from the DC area, and there are two cases that are civil cases, not criminal defense cases. And the first one is a trash pickup from basically an office tower, where the individuals are picking up the trash after it's been picked up by the housekeeping or the maintenance, or whoever's taking care of the cleaning of the inside of the office and throwing it down into a trash room. Well, the pickup of that trash apparently was okay to do out of a unlocked trash room. The second might be a case that you might wanna think about, which is Greenpeace versus Dow Chemical. Greenpeace was organizing a number of protests and regarding several oil, chemical facilities, and Dow Chemical decided to conduct an investigation to Greenpeace so that they could basically get in front of some of these activities. And so Dow be in picking the trash up of Greenpeace on a pretty regular basis, and I believe during this time, Greenpeace even moved areas. And in both these situations, Greenpeace's trash has been thrown away in office building type trash rooms. And they were entering into the office building, grabbing 'em out of the trash room, and that was held to be outside the curtilage, and abandoned in terms from the office. And again, I'm not sure that I necessarily would do that, now, obviously when this case came out, at some point in time, Greenpeace found out about this, and I'm sure Dow Chemical or his investigators or general counsel or outside law firm who was doing this may be would like to have the takeback, right? Maybe whether they could do it or whether they should do it, maybe they ought to think about whether they should have continued doing it, because we're talking about it today, and I'm sure at the time it probably made some newspaper somewhere a story. So it's something worthwhile to think about. Now, we'll tell you that one little hiccup here that has begun to change in some of this case law is whether or not you throw it out at the curtilage, but you don't have an intent to abandon it. And we have a few cases now where a company perhaps would throw out out the trash to a dumpster, then you would have an investigator come pull that trash out of the dumpster, but it wasn't a city dumpster. The dumpster instead was on their property to be picked up by a private trash contractor. In fact, I bet that most of you, if you're working in a traditional law firm, like my office here has trash burn bins, basically, located throughout our premises here, that we throw all that information into, and we have a contract with somebody who comes and gets it and destroys it, and sends us a certificate of destruction. Well, in a situation like that, you prohibit trash being picked up on an opposing party, because there's not an intent to abandon it. They've entered into a contract with which to turn it over. I will also say that if you are a federal agent or a police officer who's doing kind of white collar type investigations, that's kind of critical, because I don't think a lot of law enforcement officers are confirming that trash is actually being picked up by the city, or private investigators, or anybody else. I think a lot of times those trash pickups are done, and, oh, we got it, but there's not really, we're not crossing our T's and dotting our Is with it. Okay? Now this method of investigation is done by police all the time. It's also done by private investigators, I don't see any law firm saying, "Go pick up my opposing council's trash." I don't think anybody's doing that, I don't see that on a wide variety, but what does happen is that the trash is picked up on opposing party or witness on a regular basis for a wide variety of reasons. And sometimes you get things when you pick that trash up, that maybe you wish you didn't get. And that's what we're gonna talk about in these next two issues that are unique, but have popped their head up because of the COVID situation over the last couple years. So here are the two ethical scenarios that you need to watch out. Let's say your investigator goes out, and they picked the trash up of Joey, the Vice President. Okay? You're thinking about suing this company, for unfair trade practices or whatever, and you've decided to have the trash of the Vice President picked up, 'cause it may be critical on some things that he has. Well, there are two scenarios that you have to be aware of. Number one, what happens with special criminal evidence, and number two, what happens when you get to privileged communications? Both these are very unique, but again, they have actually popped up in the last couple of years, because many of us have kind of transformed our houses into little satellite offices, I know during the pandemic, most of us worked out of our homes, and our home offices for a good several months, until we were allowed to come back to the office. What is special criminal evidence? Well, special criminal evidence differs by jurisdiction. And if you're a criminal defense lawyer, you kind of need to have an idea of this, because it's a one time in which you actually have to turn over evidence to the prosecution. It's a one time that you have a duty to give them something that you have, and it's generally determined or defined as the instrumentalities or the fruits of the crime, in traditional times, and this has happened, I've seen it happen once or twice, it is very rare, but there have been cases where you might have a, let's say let's make it interesting, a murder. And we think when we see, if you're a civil lawyer, you see the NYPD shows and everything where they have a whole bunch of people trying to find every piece of physical evidence that may be out there in a murder. If you're in law enforcement, or you've been in law enforcement, you know that's not necessarily the truth. The reality is a lot of times you're there to help try to clean things up, get what evidence has been documented, make sure traffic is moving again. I mean, there's not this crime scene contingent that comes out there for every shooting or every killing. And sometimes we've had several cases where an investigator has a defense lawyer sent out their investigator the next day, and all of a sudden their investigator finds the cocaine or they find a gun or they find the money, it was thrown in the back alley that the police didn't get a chance to look at, 'cause they were out there at 2:00 AM. And when you have that situation, generally you have to turn it back over to the prosecution. Now how you do that and where you need to really look, I've given you a couple of cases, I've given you also some ethics opinions here that you can look at, I won't go into each one of them, 'cause the situations are similar. I'd also gave you this ABA journal article, which I think is kind of a funny little article. Now, most places, if you're in Texas or other states, California, Florida, many criminal defense lawyers, if they get the situation, a common way to get out of it is to have your buddy turn in the gun to the district attorney's office. And that way it's not coming from the defendant's lawyer, you're not having to turn something over, and basically implicate your client. So you have your co-counsel or your buddy or your suite made or somebody else in town do it, so that you can discharge that duty. District of Columbia has a unique little process for that, where you actually turn it into the state bar office, and they have somebody there at the DC bar office that actually accepts this special criminal evidence, and then turns around and hands it over to the prosecuting attorney. And this article's kind of funny, it talks about, oh, we've had cash, we've had drugs, we've had, I think at one point in time, he says there was a car that was dropped off in front of the office and then restolen, so you know, I mean there's all sorts of things, but you really should get in touch with this, and make sure that you have an idea. Also something that's kind of unique about this is it does vary jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and some jurisdiction, I think Arizona, Alaska, for instance, a couple of others, they've kind of made a determination that fruits and instrumentalities can even be documents. Well, if you're doing things like healthcare fraud, which is there's a lot of prosecution going on about that right now, or Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud, those type cases where they are basically white collar paper cases, and they're determining that the paper itself is an instrumentality or fruit of the crime. Whoa, that could be difficult, 'cause a lot of times you get in some of those cases, and there's hundreds of thousands of documents, and you have to make a decision whether they turn over and how to turn them over. So it's interesting. That's how you typically deal with special criminal evidence, it happens, not a lot, but it does happen. The second thing that I get a call about probably more than that and I get a call all the time from this from lawyers, police officers is, "Hey, I found this in the trash, "and this can be, oh, I found a tax return, "I found medical records, HIPAA information, "private photographs," but all of that pales in comparison to "I found privileged communications." Once you determine what privilege communications are, and the rules for that, the rest of the stuff becomes academic, because it will never be as sacro-saint as privilege communications. Now this was a problem probably back in the years, decades ago that we would see occasionally and it stopped, and that the reason it stopped is 'cause you don't mail a letter to your client, and then the client turns around, throws it out. And if you're with a big firm and you've drafted, hey, here's the ExxonMobil nationwide litigation strategy. You don't generally print that often, give it to 'em, it's emailed or texted or whatever. But those type of things aren't being thrown away by people. Now, again, that changed here during your coronavirus period because people were getting stuff at their house, and then they were throwing it away, there was not the security and the safety procedures that they may have had at their office, that they had time to think about, and somebody was on them about. But it depends when you receive this information, it really depends on whether your state has adopted ABA model rule 4.4 B, and basically 4.4 B has a couple different versions that has permeated throughout the states, and some of them have said, "If you obtain information "that's privileged outside of the discovery process, "you still have a duty to turn it over." Now, listen to what I said. I said outside the discovery process, if you're in the discovery process, we have the snatch back rule, it's probably somewhere in your code of civil procedure. If I give you something privileged, and I didn't mean to give it to you in a request for production, I could say, "Hey, oopsies, give it back to me" and you have to give it back to me, and I'm sure you've read it, but I still have to give it back for my evidentiary privilege, right? But that's not what we're talking about here, because if you're obtaining it from trash, or outside investigation or third party investigation, you're basically getting it outside of the discovery process. When that happens, what's the rule? Well again, some states have adopted and said, "You have to turn that over." Other states like my home state of Texas has said, "No you don't." And this meter case right here is probably the case that actually rejects that rule, and it's kind of, if you read it carefully, it's not a free pass. They're basically saying, "Listen, "you should aspire to do what the ABA rule is." But we really don't see anything in the Texas disciplinary rules or any other rules of civil procedure that necessarily apply to this type of fact pattern, and so you don't have to turn it over. And so it's something to really sit down and think about where your case is and what you have. Again, this happens rarely, but it did have a resurgence here while we were all working from home, and throwing away documents that we should have waited, and held onto and taken to the office to be shredded, or destroyed or whatever, okay? Something to think about. Okay, now, so that's your use of trash, and let me just say before we get off trash, it's extraordinarily useful. I've seen family case after family law, case custody, divorce, I've seen violation, not competition, I've seen commercial disputes hinge and turn on what was picked away, picked up in discarded trash. So it is a great tactic, it's a great investigative method, it's just there are a couple little issues there that you have to make sure that you're aware of, and make sure that your investigators are aware of, so that you're doing this stuff correctly, and that you can have a chance to use it later on down the road. All right, let's talk about tracking devices. Now, the tracking devices, the first part of it we're gonna talk about is really this movement in the Fourth Amendment, in two cases now, 'cause I'm remiss if I don't talk to you about United States versus Jones. US versus Jones basically is a Supreme Court case, I believe Scalia writes it, it basically held that you have to have a warrant for GPS monitoring for the police, okay? That's not always been the policy. And if you can see that's 12, and we'll talk about how long these tracking devices have been around, but really not long after that we had this Carpenter case, and this Carpenter case is an interesting case, because it requires that you holds that you have to have a warrant for cell site information. And the reason I put these cases in here is basically this is shifting ground, even though these are fairly modern US Supreme court cases, and the reason they're shifting ground, and I could probably spend the hour talking about these two cases and the various opinions in them. But basically Jones is decided on a trespass issue. Meaning when you walk up and put the cam, the GPS tracker on the car, and you are deducting, you're trespassing onto their personal effects, they hold that requires a warrant. And that's the majority opinion there. Now, many of you, if you think back to law school, you remember this thing called reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the old CATS test. If you don't remember CATS, it was the guy in the telephone booth with the FBI agents, and whether or not he had a reasonable expectation of privacy within that phone booth. And in Carpenter a few years later, when we got to this cell site information, the majority kind of flipped and says, begins to rely on CATS, there and they don't really flip, but you just get some additional justices who've come on and begin to hold that CATS really is this reasonable expectation of privacy is the reason that they hold that. And so these two cases when you're talking about tracking devices and in terms of what the government can and can't do, again, we're not private party, just the government under the Fourth Amendment, you really need to take some time to read these, and if you're a criminal defense lawyer, I'm sure you have, but these justices are not in the same place, even in the majority, in the minority. In fact, I think Gorsuch is probably now on record saying that he doesn't necessarily think CATS was decided completely correctly. So this is shifting ground from a constitutional level, but let's kind of get to a more practical level, which is your state tracking device law. Now a lot of states have state tracking devices, okay? And I wanna talk about, there are really three types. The first ones are those that are silent, or they're part of the stalking statute, right? So those are that they just don't have anything on record about a GPS statute, I believe right now, Ohio has a couple statutes that are coming up in their legislature, but they're basically silent, or a lot of times the state will have it as part of their stalking statute, which really requires some type of intent. And so they don't really apply to what we're dealing with. Now just because they don't have a statute, and I do think this is a real problem with both investigators, law enforcement officials, doesn't mean that it's fair game, right? Your private investigator can still be sued under an invasion of privacy test. In fact, Texas was one of the first states really to get a tracking device statute here. And I had something to do with that, and when we passed it, we passed it because tracking devices had come into use here in Texas, and we had a lot of lawsuits where one party was suing, usually the investigator, usually also the attorney, usually also the opposing party, under an invasion of privacy claim for placing a tracking device on their vehicle. So it is something, this Demo versus Kirksey is just that case, it's a case where, although the tracking device is placed in on a state where there is a law that allows 'em to do it, they leave the state and go to another state where it's silent. And because of that, they are allowed to bring the tort of invasion of privacy basically, and the claims can be upheld. Now the second type is where it's really clear absent, either consent or ownership that you cannot track another. California's got a pretty clear statute, a number of others. There are some that have somewhat ambiguous language and left to their interpretation, and Texas, my home state is one of those, although it has cleared itself up, I think now, and it is extraordinarily clear at this point. For instance, the Texas statute, which has been replicated in number of states, basically says a person commits a offense if the person knowingly installs a tracking device on a vehicle owned by another. Well, that doesn't seem confusing at all. I mean, it doesn't seem ambiguous, except that Texas is a community property state. And remember, we're talking about that relationship amongst family members now. I theoretically own a undivided one half interest of my wife's Cadillac. Maybe it's titled under her name, but don't I own a community property interest in that? So therefore I can track that car without her knowledge, because I theoretically own it, and the answer probably is yeah, maybe. And in fact, for many years, that's what it was, now in 2018, we've had this Dishman case, and this case has basically said, "Well, no, it can't because ..." and it's kind of a very statutory construction type case, but it basically says that, "Look, "we're not under the penal code where this statute resides. "It really deals with this "who has a superior right to possession." And generally either you or your wife are gonna have the superior right to possession of her car, right? Maybe titled under your name, but she's driving it, and she's the one that possesses it, okay? We're not going, what we're not going to do is what this court says is jump from the penal code to the family code without some reason to do so, particularly when the definition is already at the beginning of the penal code. So I think it's cleared itself up, but it was a little bit of a hiccup. Now I've got a couple slides here that talk about the Federal Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act. We've had several bills, bills over the years that have been filed in Congress to kind of adopt a tracking device law, that hasn't happened, and I don't think that it necessarily likely will come back, but we don't have anything currently in Congress, but there have been multiple efforts to try and make some type of national act similar to the ECPA. And just like the Wiretap Act that we talked about, at the beginning of the first hour, it would probably, if you look at these sample bills that have been filed, regulate somewhat like The Wiretap Act, there would be a minimum level of privacy guaranteed, and then every state could go above and beyond that, should they want to. Now I wanna talk just broadly about some of these tracking devices for the sole purpose to talk about how long these things have been going on, how long we've had tracking devices, and how slow the courts have been to move them. Most of these statutes came around 2000, okay? So just kind of keep that in mind. And many states don't have 'em, as I just mentioned, Ohio has one that's currently pending, that may have a chance of getting passed, but tracking devices today from a practical standpoint are used quite a bit, and they're used in two areas, number one, commercial property cases, tracking and investigating cargo theft, product theft, both planes, trains, cars, employee vehicles, and all those things are, they're used routinely and effectively in those type of cases. In the family law cases they are used, but I will tell you that in our agency, we just will not approve one, for divorce or child custody. There are two very rare circumstances. The first is what I call the errant 16-year-old, you've got a, we're tracking a 16-year-old daughter, which mom and dad owned the vehicle, and had a good faith reason to believe that we need to track the vehicle for safety reasons, or the polar opposite of that is where you have, somebody's been getting up in the age of 70, and now we've got a wife who's been away for a while, who is listed as their caretaker, basically wanting to track the car, so that should he leave, we could find him if he forgets where he's at. But really most investigators I think are, if you're in a family law practice, you really need to be careful with the idea of using these in a family law case, because they can really blow up in your face. Now, as I talked about how long have these things been going on? Well, they've been going on for some time. I will tell you that in the private sector, tracking devices were used in the early 1980s. Now they weren't GPS, they were mostly radio triangulation, which from a field perspective works a little bit better when you're in a concrete jungle like downtown Dallas, or Houston, or New York City or Miami, places like that, mainly because those things will transmit through concrete, but that's how long that they've been there commercially. Now I have been told, and I don't know if this is a true story, but it's such a good story that if it's not true, it ought to be, that really the tracking device first started when somebody from the deputy director at the Central Intelligence Agency went to go see a movie called Goldfinger, which is a James Bond movie, and saw that, and in that movie, Sean Connery drives around his Aston Martin with basically a radar, which is a tracking device. And he came back to the agency and said, "Hey guys, we need this, go make it." Now I don't know if that's really true, but if it is, let's just think there hypothetically, if that really is true, then that goes back to like 1960-something, I believe is when Goldfinger came out, let's say 60, 65, so now we're only 65 years behind, 70 years behind the eight ball in terms of the courts, and the statutes and the law, and I was doing this speech one time for a group of guys, out of California that were all retired law enforcement officers. And a gentleman stood up and says, "Well, actually, Wes, "the tracking device goes back to the 1920s, 30s." I said, 'Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Well, back in those days in LA", he says, "If you ever looked at LA, we had these long streets "like in the movies." And he said "Back during that time, "all the cars of course were black, they all looked alike, "and so when they would follow somebody, "they would typically go up there police detectives, "and they would screw a hole in the back "of the rear taillight, "so that when you would hit the brake, "a bright light would shine out the back, "and from blocks away, you could see the car "that you were tracking." Well, again, I don't know if that story is true or not, but if that story is true, then we're only like 100 years behind, or a little under 80 years, okay? In terms of this technology, which is really pretty well known at this point. And we still have states too are kinda late to the game in terms of passing statutes, and defining how that technology can be used appropriately. So it begins to tell you how slow we are into reacting to all of these things. What is the next thing? Well, as you can see here, there are a couple of in this next slide is this idea of license plate recognition, and license plate recognition is probably the newest thing, although we have a number of courts now who have basically stamped this off and said, "License plate recognition is really nothing more", and that's what this Bushy and Fairfax County Police Department case is, that have said that this holds a muster in terms of Fourth Amendment, it holds a muster in terms of you're watching cars out in the public domain. If you're not familiar with license plate recognition, what it is is there are these cameras that have now been mounted on oh, telephone poles, they've been mounted on toll road cameras, squad cars, one of the biggest feeders of that system is tow truck drivers, and as these cars run around town, they scoop up and record your license tag, and the place that you've been at, where they've seen you, and they usually take a photograph of your car, and they compile all of that data, and allow us to enter your license tag, let's say it's ABC 123 into a system, and it tells us where they've seen you around town. If you're in a major metropolitan area, I guarantee you you're gonna have 30, 40, 50, 100 sightings perhaps, where it's caught your vehicle at maybe your work, parked outside your home, parked outside your bank, at your restaurant, wherever, you know, wherever you have it. And that information is extraordinarily powerful. Now there's a lot of good reasons for that information, right? Law enforcement needs it, there is some use of it, frankly now, not some, a lot of use now, in trying to find vehicles that shouldn't be driven on the streets, there's a lot of use by financial institutions to go get cars back that people haven't paid on, there's a lot of good use determining traffic patterns, where people are moving to, so that before your government spends billions of dollars, they have an idea of where things are headed. And so there is quite a bit of good about that, but it's also now being merged into a number of other type of technological advancements. So they're now merging it into various public record databases, so that eventually this material can all be linked together to give the user of that data better information. And for instance, here in the DFW area, Dallas Forth Worth area, we've had a gentleman who designed a program that is pretty phenomenal. And what it does is it's for constables who are serving warrants out on individuals, and what it says, okay, I have a warrant for Wes, what are we gonna do? Well, today is Tuesday, we know that he, on Tuesday, we've seen his car outside of the do drop in, so let's go check that first. If you don't find him there, go to the park, because we've arrested him at the park three times based on public records. Oh, if you don't find him there, go to his mother's house, 'cause we've seen the car there at the mom's house, and that's also the address that he uses to get the car note at, so why don't you go try that? And it basically predicts where these guys may or may not be. It's very interesting things. Now I'm gonna go through the next couple of slides fairly quickly. Part of the reason license plate recognition works, and facial recognition does not, facial recognition does work from a technological standpoint, but the problem is we don't, your facial recognition, your face is basically, we don't have a great database of your face other than social media. The one database you might think that we would have would be your driver's license, but unfortunately here in most states, your driver's license photo is protected. It's not open record law, except for maybe two or three states. The vast majority it's not. And so most of the time the people building these systems out are not the government it's in fact private business who has found a need or resell for it, and so that's what they've tried to do. The other issue too is that your face may have some protection under certain areas of law, for instance, in Illinois, and that says Pruitt versus Par-A-Dice Hotel Casino created the Illinois Biometric Act. And it gives you some ownership interest in your face or your likeness, a lot of that is happening in overseas, if you've been familiar with the GDPR European data privacy regulation, in fact, Germany's a great example, basically said that faces in surveillance video are probably protected under GDPR, and lately, if you've got surveillance video from Germany though, many times blur out the face, unless you have a superior right. So it is interesting. The issue with the license plate recognition is that the license tag, that is public record, and we have to have that to be public record motor vehicle. We have it for all sorts of reasons, right? Financing, identifying the vehicles, who owns what, I mean there's reasons that the license tag information has to be out there just for business, basically. I have one, two other issues that I'd like to deal with in a very quickly time. Social media. There are really only one main issue in social media that I see as a landmine for you. First off, I think now there are several cases that have basically said, if you're not looking at social media, particularly if you're like a criminal defense lawyer, that can be ineffective assistance of counsel. Now that depends on every state that you may be in, but if you're not conducting a social media investigation in your litigation or your cases, I think you might be crazy, because everybody is on it. Everybody, depending on what age you are, you might be on a different platform, but everybody's on it. The second thing that I see is a real problem with a lot of law firms is that the fake friending, okay? You know, you have that ethical responsibility in all your disciplinary rules that says that you have to comport your subordinates character with yours and your subordinate can't go around lying about who they are to gain information off social media. I see paralegals doing that all the time. Oh, I just friended them, and told them that I was, went to their kid's school, or something like that. Don't do that, that can be very, very dangerous. And of course, with social media, there's a trail on everything. So kind of be careful about that. Finally, the last topic that we'll talk about today is drones. Now there's really a couple things about drones that I think are worthwhile for you to know, from a very high level. So the Federal FAA has been late to the game is the nice way to say it with drones. They did not want to regulate them. I think they thought that they were like model airplanes, frankly. And of course, as we all know, drones have all sorts of issues, but the FAA has regulated drones, but they've really kicked the ball in terms of privacy regulation down to the local government level. And that's what we have now is it's state and local law, and so some of those vary so wildly that it's hard to tell and you have to look at each one of your jurisdictions. For instance, New York City has an administrative code that basically prohibits you flying a drone in the city, period. Doesn't matter for what reason or for who, you just can't do it. For the most part and the reasons that we would be thinking about flying a drone. Other areas like Mississippi and several other states have really just tied it to a video voyeurism type statute. If you're flying a drone and you're taking photographs for lewd and lascivious purposes or for sexual gratification, well again, that may not necessarily apply to conducting investigations, but it's still an issue. New Hampshire has this unique one about hunting. You can't hunt with a drone. I'm not really sure how that works, although I am a fisher and hunter man, I don't know how you hunt with the drone necessarily. And then finally, some places have really taken a strong stance, Texas, my home state is one of them. Texas passed the Texas Privacy Act that prohibits a drone from being flown over the property of another, unless there's some very minor, there are some exceptions, but it's pretty well-regulated. I was actually there on the day of the legislature passed this statute, and when they passed it, DPS, which is the Department of Public Safety in Texas is 800 pound gorilla in terms of legislative acumen and power, tried to obtain an exception, and the state legislature kicked it down. And not only when did they kick it down today, kick it down, and in a state that's been very pro-law enforcement, they cheered it kicking it down. And I think that goes to tell you that people do not like these drones. They do not like the privacy implications of 'em, I think that you will see more and more statutes that prohibit the use of 'em by law enforcement, by private individuals to do any type of surveillance with them. Okay, I know I've run a few minutes over, I'm sorry for that, I hope you found this stuff interesting, I hope you found it useful, I hope I also didn't scare you away from using investigators or conducting fact investigations in your case. It's critical that you do so. I've hit some high level rules here, and some areas where you need to be kind of careful, and maybe watch out as time goes on, but this stuff can really help your practice, and it can really help your clients, particularly if you find facts out that can change your case and your outcome. Again, my name's Wes Bearden, and I hope you had a good time. Thank you.
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