The Digital Curtain

After cameras tracked Navy veteran Lee Schmidt 526 times, a federal ruling effectively dismantles the right to public anonymity.

[Speaker 2]: Five hundred and twenty-six. [Speaker 1]: That’s the number? [Speaker 2]: That is the exact number. In roughly four months, that is how many times the Norfolk Police Department logged the location of Lee Schmidt’s pickup truck. [Speaker 1]: And Lee Schmidt isn’t a suspect. He’s not a person of interest. [Speaker 2]: No. He’s a retired Navy veteran. He was going to the grocery store, his doctor’s office, and driving his wife to work. But on average, the city’s cameras were capturing his movement four times a day, every single day. [Speaker 1]: This week, a federal court looked at those numbers-looked at the fact that a law-abiding citizen was tracked 500 times in a few months without a warrant-and said, essentially, "This is fine." [Speaker 2]: Well, they said it’s constitutional. Which, in the surveillance world, is the same thing as a green light. [Speaker 1]: Two days ago, a federal judge handed down a ruling in *Schmidt v. Norfolk* that effectively ends the era of anonymity on public roads. It validates a strategy the police chief there calls a "nice curtain of technology." [Speaker 2]: And that curtain is designed to make sure that if you move through the city, you cannot do it unseen. [Speaker 1]: It’s Thursday, January 29, 2026, and you’re listening to The Angle. [Speaker 1]: So, Tuesday. January 27th. We get the summary judgment from U.S. District Judge Mark Davis. And for privacy advocates who have been watching this case for almost two years, this was the nightmare scenario. [Speaker 2]: It really was. The Institute for Justice-that’s the firm representing the drivers-they were hoping this case would establish a hard line. They wanted the court to say that a network of 172 AI-powered cameras is so dense, so inescapable, that it functions just like a GPS tracker. [Speaker 1]: Which would mean the police need a warrant to use it. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. Under the Supreme Court’s *Carpenter* ruling from 2018, police need a warrant to access your historical cell phone data because it reveals the "whole of your movements." The plaintiffs here were arguing that 172 cameras do the exact same thing. [Speaker 1]: But Judge Davis didn’t buy it. [Speaker 2]: He didn’t. He granted summary judgment to the City of Norfolk. He ruled that while the surveillance is, quote, "extensive," it is still "fragmented." He said it doesn’t amount to total tracking yet, so the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. [Speaker 1]: That word "yet" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. [Speaker 2]: It is, and we’ll get to the judge’s hesitation in a minute. But the immediate result is that the "curtain" stays up. [Speaker 1]: Let’s talk about that curtain. Because that’s not my metaphor, and it’s not yours. That is the specific language used by Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot when he sold this program to the city. [Speaker 2]: Right. This goes back to 2023. Chief Talbot went to the City Council and explicitly said he wanted to install a, quote, "nice curtain of technology" around the city. The goal was very clear: if you enter Norfolk, or if you move around inside it, the police will know. [Speaker 1]: And the argument for this-the city’s argument-is security. It’s efficiency. [Speaker 2]: It’s what they call "Precision Policing." And look, to be fair to the city, they have a problem. They have a shortage of officers and they have real issues with violent crime and stolen vehicles. The Chief argues that he can’t stop crime if he can’t see the criminals.…