Aerial surveillance doctrine

The aerial surveillance doctrine is the legal doctrine in the United States of America that under the Fourth Amendment, aerial surveillance of an individual’s property does not inherently constitute a search for which law enforcement must obtain a warrant. Courts have used several factors–sometimes only one or a few, other times many or all of them–to determine whether the surveillance in question is a search in violation of one’s constitutional rights: the object of the surveillance (whether it is commercial property or an individual’s home or curtilage), the technology employed (whether, on the basis of its capabilities, it simply enables “naked eye” observations or allows the user to acquire otherwise unobtainable information), the duration of the surveillance, scope of aggregated information (whether it is limited or extensive in nature), and the vantage point from which the surveillance is conducted (whether it is from a place that one can reasonably expect to be observed).

Source: Wikipedia — Aerial surveillance doctrine (CC BY-SA 4.0)