Case Title: Commonwealth v. Mora

Citation: 

Docket Number: SJC-12890

State: massachusetts

Court: Massachusetts Supreme Court

Date: 2020-08-06T00:00:00Z

Document:
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SJC-12890 
 
COMMONWEALTH  vs.  NELSON MORA 
(and two companion cases1). 
 
 
 
Essex.     May 5, 2020. - August 6, 2020. 
 
Present:  Gants, C.J., Lenk, Gaziano, Lowy, Budd, Cypher, & 
Kafker, JJ. 
 
 
Electronic Surveillance.  Privacy.  Constitutional Law, Search 
and seizure, Privacy.  Search and Seizure, Electronic 
surveillance, Expectation of privacy.  Practice, Criminal, 
Motion to suppress, Interlocutory appeal. 
 
 
 
 
Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court 
Department on August 30, 2018, and September 13, 2018. 
 
 
Pretrial motions to suppress evidence were heard by Timothy 
Q. Feeley, J. 
 
 
An application for leave to prosecute an interlocutory 
appeal was allowed by Lenk, J., in the Supreme Judicial Court 
for the county of Suffolk, and the case was reported by her. 
 
 
 
Stephen D. Judge for the defendants. 
 
Anna Lumelsky, Assistant Attorney General, for the 
Commonwealth. 
 
Jennifer Lynch & Andrew Crocker, of California, Gregory T. 
Nojeim, of the District of Columbia, & Matthew R. Segal, Jessie 
                                                     
 
 
1 Commonwealth vs. Randy Suarez and Commonwealth vs. Lymbel 
Guerrero. 
2 
 
 
J. Rossman, Kristin M. Mulvey, & Nathan Freed Wessler, for 
American Civil Liberties Union & others, amici curiae, submitted 
a brief. 
 
 
LENK, J.  Over a period of seven months, the Attorney 
General investigated an alleged drug distribution network based 
in Essex County.  At different times during the course of the 
investigation, officers installed a total of five hidden video 
cameras on public telephone and electrical poles.  Three of 
these cameras were aimed towards homes of alleged members of the 
drug conspiracy.  Using the video footage collected by these 
"pole cameras," in addition to other evidence, the Commonwealth 
secured indictments against twelve defendants, including the 
defendants Nelson Mora, Ricky Suarez, and Lymbel Guerrero.  
Eight defendants moved to suppress the pole camera footage, and 
evidence derived from that footage, as the fruits of an 
unreasonable search, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the 
United States Constitution and art. 14 of the Massachusetts 
Declaration of Rights.  A Superior Court judge denied their 
motions on the ground that the pole camera surveillance did not 
constitute a search in the constitutional sense. 
We conclude that the continuous, long-term pole camera 
surveillance targeted at the residences of Mora and Suarez well 
may have been a search within the meaning of the Fourth 
Amendment, a question we do not reach, but certainly was a 
3 
 
 
search under art. 14.  We remand for further findings as to 
whether investigators had probable cause to conduct these 
searches when the cameras targeted at Mora's and Suarez's houses 
were first installed. 
1.  Background.  The parties stipulated to the essential 
facts relevant to the motion to suppress.2 
In November of 2017, a confidential informant (CI) 
identified Mora as a large-scale drug distributor.  The CI 
introduced an undercover officer to Mora for the purposes of 
arranging controlled drug purchases.  Over the course of the 
investigation, the officer made ten controlled purchases of 
oxycodone and fentanyl from Mora.3 
Shortly after the first controlled purchase, on December 6, 
2017, investigators installed a pole camera near Mora's house in 
Lynn.  This camera afforded a view of a portion of the front of 
his house, the sidewalk next to it, and the adjacent street.  On 
March 23, 2018, investigators set up a second camera near 
                                                     
 
2 In addition to hearing the defendants' motions to suppress 
the pole camera evidence, the motion judge also allowed several 
applications for search warrants and issued the requested 
warrants during the course of this investigation.  The judge 
incorporated information contained in those search warrant 
affidavits in his decision denying the motions to suppress the 
pole camera evidence at issue here. 
 
3 While the record reflects that Mora completed what were 
alleged to be drug transactions at multiple locations, it is not 
clear whether any of the controlled purchases occurred at or 
near his residence. 
4 
 
 
Suarez's residence in Peabody, which provided a similar view of 
his home.  The cameras directed at Mora's and Suarez's homes 
provided investigators with a view of their front doorways.  
Investigators later installed pole cameras in three other 
locations; one was directed along a street allegedly used by 
Mora to conduct his drug business, one was directed at the home 
of another defendant, and the final one near the home of another 
individual who is not a defendant.  All of the cameras recorded 
uninterruptedly, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 
until May 23, 2018.  In total, the camera positioned near Mora's 
home captured 169 days of footage; the camera near Suarez's 
house captured sixty-two days. 
The pole cameras used in the investigation shared the same 
technical capabilities.  Each camera was able to make video but 
not audio recordings.  None of the cameras had infrared or night 
vision capabilities, nor could they view inside any residence.  
Investigators also could, however, remotely zoom and angle the 
cameras in real time.  On occasion, these features permitted 
investigators to read the license plate on a vehicle.  These 
cameras captured without limitation all persons coming and going 
from the targeted residences. 
While the cameras were operating, investigators could view 
the footage remotely using a web-based browser.  The footage 
also was saved in a searchable format, allowing officers to 
5 
 
 
review particular previously-recorded events.  All of the data 
gathered through this surveillance was stored on a State police 
server, and later preserved on a removable computer hard drive. 
Beginning in March of 2018, while the pole camera 
surveillance was underway, investigators sought and secured 
warrants for other forms of surveillance, including wiretaps of 
Mora's and other defendants' cellular telephones, as well as 
global positioning system (GPS) monitoring.  On May 21, 2018, in 
conjunction with the arrests of the twelve defendants, 
investigators obtained search warrants for several locations, 
including the residences of Mora, Suarez, and Guerrero.  The 
subsequent residential searches uncovered substantial quantities 
of heroin, cocaine, and other illicit substances, along with 
approximately $415,000 in United States currency. 
Mora, Suarez, and Guerrero moved to suppress the pole 
camera footage, as well as other evidence derived from that 
footage.4  The five remaining5 defendants joined their motions.  
In October of 2019, the motion judge held an evidentiary hearing 
on these consolidated motions. 
                                                     
 
4 Mora also moved to suppress the evidence collected 
pursuant to wiretap warrants.  A different Superior Court judge 
denied this motion after a nonevidentiary hearing.  The denial 
of this motion is not before us. 
 
5 By the time the motion to suppress the pole camera 
evidence was filed, four of the twelve defendants had pleaded 
guilty to drug-related offenses. 
6 
 
 
In a detailed memorandum and decision, the judge denied the 
motions to suppress on the ground that the pole camera 
surveillance did not violate the defendants' "reasonable 
expectation[s] of privacy."  See Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 
347, 360 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring).  He concluded that the 
defendants whose homes were not captured by pole cameras, 
including Guerrero's, experienced only a de minimis invasion of 
their privacy.  The judge acknowledged that the defendants whose 
residences were targeted, including Mora and Suarez, presented 
stronger arguments.  Nonetheless, he determined that, because 
the pole camera surveillance in this case captured only 
information that was otherwise visible to the public, it was not 
so invasive that it constituted a "search" in the constitutional 
sense. 
The judge distinguished the video footage collected by the 
pole cameras from location tracking data such as GPS monitoring 
and cell site location information (CSLI) gathered from cellular 
telephones.  See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Augustine, 467 Mass. 
230, 255 (2014), S.C., 470 Mass. 837 and 472 Mass. 448 (2015) 
(accessing multiple weeks of historical CSLI was "search" under 
art 14).  The judge noted that the pole cameras covered only a 
fixed point; thus, he concluded, they did not track the 
defendants through public and private spaces, thereby revealing 
details about their private associations.  Because, in his view, 
7 
 
 
this surveillance did not expose the same degree of 
associational information as novel tracking technologies, such 
as CSLI, the judge determined that pole cameras remain a 
traditional surveillance technique that may be employed without 
a warrant.6 
Three of the defendants -- Mora, Suarez, and Guerrero -- 
filed a petition in the county court for leave to pursue an 
interlocutory appeal of the denial of their motions to suppress; 
the single justice allowed the consolidated petitions and 
ordered that the appeal proceed in this court. 
2.  Discussion.  a.  Standard of review.  Typically, 
"[w]hen reviewing a ruling on a motion to suppress, we accept 
the judge's subsidiary findings of fact absent clear error but 
conduct an independent review of his ultimate findings and 
conclusions of law" (quotations and citation omitted).  
Commonwealth v. Almonor, 482 Mass. 35, 40 (2019).  Because the 
                                                     
 
6 In reaching this determination, the judge expressly 
disagreed with both the reasoning and the holding of United 
States v. Moore-Bush, 381 F. Supp. 3d 139 (D. Mass. 2019), where 
a Federal District Court judge concluded that similar use of a 
pole camera was a search under the Fourth Amendment.  The United 
States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit since has reversed 
that District Court decision; the court concluded that the 
District Court was bound by circuit precedent that pole camera 
surveillance of a home is not a search, and that this precedent 
was not undermined by subsequent decisions by the United States 
Supreme Court.  See United States v. Moore, 963 F.3d 29, 31-32 
(1st Cir. 2020). 
8 
 
 
judge's findings were based entirely on documentary evidence,7 
however, we review both his findings of fact and his conclusions 
of law de novo.  See Commonwealth v. Johnson, 481 Mass. 710, 
714-715, cert. denied, 140 S. Ct. 247 (2019). 
b.  Whether the pole camera footage should have been 
suppressed.  On appeal, the central question remains whether the 
pole camera surveillance of Mora, Suarez, and Guerrero was a 
warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment or 
art. 14, such that the evidence gathered through that 
surveillance should be suppressed.  We first must decide whether 
any of the surveillance in this case was a "search" in the 
constitutional sense.  Commonwealth v. Magri, 462 Mass. 360, 366 
(2012).  "Under both the Federal and Massachusetts 
Constitutions, a search in the constitutional sense occurs when 
the government's conduct intrudes on a person's reasonable 
expectation of privacy."  Augustine, 467 Mass. at 241. 
Most courts to have addressed pole camera surveillance have 
concluded that it does not infringe on any reasonable 
expectation of privacy.  The recent decision in United States v. 
Moore-Bush, 963 F.3d 29 (1st Cir. 2020), typifies these courts' 
approach.  There, the United States Court of Appeals for the 
                                                     
 
7 At this hearing, the parties submitted a joint stipulation 
of facts regarding the pole camera surveillance, along with 
photographs depicting the views afforded by each camera.  The 
judge did not receive any testimonial evidence. 
9 
 
 
First Circuit determined that pole camera surveillance is not a 
search because it falls under the "public view" principle that 
an individual does not have an expectation of privacy in items 
or places he exposes to the public.  See id. at 32.  See id. at 
42, quoting California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207, 213 (1986) 
("[a]ny home located on a busy public street is subject to the 
unrelenting gaze of passersby, yet '[t]he Fourth Amendment 
protection of the home has never been extended to require law 
enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home 
on public thoroughfares'").  See also United States v. Bucci, 
582 F.3d 108, 116–117 (1st Cir. 2009); United States v. Jackson, 
213 F.3d 1269, 1280–1281 (10th Cir.), judgment vacated on other 
grounds, 531 U.S. 1033 (2000); United States vs. Aguilera, U.S. 
Dist. Ct., No. 06-CR-336 (E.D. Wis. Feb. 11, 2008). 
Following the United States Supreme Court's decisions in 
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 404 (2012), and Carpenter 
v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206, 2217 (2018), which discussed 
how extended GPS vehicle tracking and CSLI surveillance can 
intrude on reasonable expectations of privacy, several courts 
have reassessed prolonged pole camera surveillance.  See, e.g. 
United States vs. Vargas, U.S. Dist. Ct., No. CR-13-6025, slip 
op. at 27 (E.D. Wash. Dec. 15, 2014) (six weeks of pole camera 
surveillance was search); State v. Jones, 2017 SD 59, ¶ 43 (two 
months of pole camera surveillance was search); People v. 
10 
 
 
Tafoya, 2019COA176 ¶ 51 (three months of pole camera 
surveillance constituted search).  The defendants urge us to 
follow in the footsteps of these courts, and to apply the 
"mosaic theory," which we adopted in Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 
484 Mass. 493, 504-505 (2020), to conclude that the extended and 
targeted pole camera surveillance of the defendants violated 
their reasonable expectations of privacy. Neither we, nor the 
United States Supreme Court, have considered the constitutional 
implications of the long-term and targeted video surveillance at 
issue in this case.  Because the status of pole camera 
surveillance "remains an open question as a matter of Fourth 
Amendment jurisprudence," we will not "wade into these Fourth 
Amendment waters."  See Almonor, 482 Mass. at 42 n.9.  "Instead 
we decide the issue based on our State Constitution, bearing in 
mind that art. 14 . . . does, or may, afford more substantive 
protection to individuals than that which prevails under the 
Constitution of the United States" (quotations and citation 
omitted).  Id. 
To show that the use of pole cameras in this case was a 
"search" under art. 14, the defendants bear the burden of 
establishing that (1) they "manifested a subjective expectation 
of privacy in the object of the search," and (2) "society is 
willing to recognize that expectation as reasonable."  
11 
 
 
Augustine, 467 Mass. at 242, quoting Commonwealth v. Montanez, 
410 Mass. 290, 301 (1991). 
i.  Subjective expectation of privacy.  For the reasons to 
be discussed, we conclude that Mora and Suarez have established 
that they manifested a subjective expectation of privacy in the 
aggregate of their activities captured by the security cameras.  
Guerrero, however, has not. 
 
Guerrero does not challenge the use of any pole camera near 
his own home, but, rather, the surveillance of his movements in 
other spaces.  Although he filed an affidavit in support of his 
motion to suppress, he did not explicitly state within it that 
he expected his movements to go unobserved.  Accordingly, 
defendant Guerrero has presented no direct evidence that he 
manifested a subjective expectation of privacy.  Nor can we 
extrapolate such an expectation from this record.  While we have 
sometimes inferred an expectation of privacy where a defendant 
repeatedly "cho[se] to meet his codefendant in a quiet 
residential area," McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 497 n.5, there is no 
indication how often Guerrero met his codefendants in these 
less-traveled settings.  Guerrero therefore cannot establish 
that his professed expectation of privacy applies to anything 
more than a handful of observations of his activities in spaces 
visible to the public.  We will not infer that he manifested a 
subjective expectation of privacy on this basis alone. 
12 
 
 
Both Mora and Suarez, however, filed affidavits in which 
they stated that they did not expect to be surveilled coming and 
going from their homes over an extended period.  Cf. Augustine, 
467 Mass. at 255 n.38 ("In support of his motion to suppress, 
the defendant submitted an affidavit stating that he acquired 
his cellular telephone for his own personal use, never 
permitting the police or other law enforcement officials access 
to his telephone records").  Considering the two months and five 
months for which Suarez and Mora's residences, respectively, 
were the targets of video surveillance, these affidavits are 
sufficient. 
 
We reject the Commonwealth's contention that the absence of 
fencing or other efforts to shield Mora's and Suarez's 
residences from view shows that they lacked any subjective 
expectation of privacy in those areas.  The traditional barriers 
to long term surveillance of spaces visible to the public have 
not been walls or hedges –- they have been time and police 
resources.  See Jones, 565 U.S. at 429 (Alito, J. concurring).  
While people subjectively may lack an expectation of privacy in 
some discrete actions they undertake in unshielded areas around 
their homes, they do not expect that every such action will be 
observed and perfectly preserved for the future.  See, e.g., 
United States v. Anderson-Bagshaw, 509 Fed. Appx. 396, 405 (6th 
Cir. 2012) ("Few people, it seems, would expect that the 
13 
 
 
government can constantly film their backyard for over three 
weeks using a secret camera that can pan and zoom and stream a 
live image to government agents"). 
Moreover, requiring defendants to erect physical barriers 
around their residences before invoking the protections of the 
Fourth Amendment and art. 14 would make those protections too 
dependent on the defendants' resources.  In Commonwealth v. 
Leslie, 477 Mass. 48, 54 (2017), we noted that affording 
different levels of protection to different kinds of residences 
"is troubling because it would apportion Fourth Amendment 
protections on grounds that correlate with income, race, and 
ethnicity" (quotation and citation omitted).  Similarly, the 
capacity to build privacy fences and other similar structures 
likely would correlate closely with land ownership and wealth.8 
A resource-dependent approach thus would be contrary to the 
history and spirit of art. 14.  As Eighteenth Century British 
Prime Minister William Pitt said when opposing warrantless 
searches, 
"The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to 
all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail; its 
roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the 
storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of 
                                                     
 
8 It is not clear from this record whether any of the 
defendants owned his home, such that he could have erected 
privacy fences if he had desired to and been able to afford to 
do so. 
14 
 
 
England may not enter; all his force dares not cross 
the threshold of the ruined tenement." 
 
Donohue, The Original Fourth Amendment, 83 U. Chi. L. Rev. 
1181, 1238 (2016) (Donohue). 
We will not undermine these long-held egalitarian 
principles by making the protections of art. 14 contingent upon 
an individual's ability to afford to install fortifications and 
a moat around his or her castle.9 
ii.  Reasonable expectation of privacy.  Whether Mora and 
Suarez's expectation of privacy is one that society would regard 
as "'reasonable,' 'justifiable,' or 'legitimate'" is a more 
difficult question (citation omitted).  See Commonwealth v. One 
1985 Ford Thunderbird Auto., 416 Mass. 603, 607 (1993).  "The 
inquiry is one highly dependent on the particular facts and 
circumstances of the case."  Id.  Among the factors this court 
has considered are "whether the public had access to, or might 
be expected to be in, the area from which the surveillance was 
undertaken; the character of the area (or object) that was the 
subject of the surveillance; and whether the defendant has taken 
                                                     
 
9 Placing dispositive weight on efforts to shield a place 
from public view also would be in tension with the United States 
Supreme Court's observation in Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 213, that 
"the mere fact that an individual has taken measures to restrict 
some views of his activities [does not] preclude an officer's 
observation from a public vantage point where he [or she] has a 
right to be and which renders the activities clearly visible." 
15 
 
 
normal precautions to protect his or her privacy."  Almonor, 482 
Mass. at 42 n.10. 
In Commonwealth v. Rousseau, 465 Mass. 372, 382 (2013), 
this court considered whether "contemporaneous electronic 
monitoring of one's comings and goings in public places invades 
one's reasonable expectation of privacy."  For the first time, 
we recognized that "under art. 14, a person may reasonably 
expect not to be subjected to extended GPS electronic 
surveillance by the government, targeted at his [or her] 
movements, without judicial oversight and a showing of probable 
cause."  Id. 
Recently, we adapted the reasonable expectation of privacy 
analysis of Rousseau to automatic license plate reader (ALPR) 
cameras by adopting the "mosaic theory."  McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 
503-504.  As we explained, "[a] detailed account of a person's 
movements, drawn from electronic surveillance, encroaches upon a 
person's reasonable expectation of privacy because the whole 
reveals far more than the sum of the parts." Id. at 504.  
Extended surveillance "reveals types of information not revealed 
by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does 
repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble" 
(citation omitted).  Id.  We ultimately held, on the limited 
record before us, that the "four cameras at fixed locations on 
the ends of two bridges" did not reveal this kind of 
16 
 
 
constitutionally-sensitive information, and, thus, the automatic 
ALPR surveillance employed in McCarthy did not rise to the level 
of a search.  Id. at 509. 
In this case, as in McCarthy, we are considering the import 
of a relatively small number of cameras, here, five.  Only two 
of these cameras were targeted at Mora's and Suarez's 
residences.  The defendants nonetheless argue that all footage 
from any of the five cameras that captures their comings and 
goings must be suppressed under the mosaic theory.  We do not 
agree.  Rather, we conclude that the cameras installed to 
surveil the defendants' homes were of greater constitutional 
significance than those, as in McCarthy, that were directed at a 
public highway. 
A.  Surveillance away from the defendants' home.  To the 
extent that the pole cameras in this case surveilled the 
defendants away from their own homes, we conclude that this 
surveillance, like the ALPR use in McCarthy, was not a search in 
the constitutional sense.  At most, it appears that Mora, 
Suarez, and Guerrero were each captured, on a few occasions, by 
two cameras directed at a different codefendant's residence.  
Such short-term, intermittent, and nontargeted video recording 
of a person away from his or her own home is little different 
from being captured by the security cameras that proliferate in 
public spaces.  The United States Supreme Court recognized this 
17 
 
 
traditional nontargeted use of video cameras when it referred to 
"security cameras" as among the "conventional surveillance 
techniques and tools" that were not called into question by its 
holding in Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2220.  Law enforcement 
officers appropriately have relied on security cameras, and 
other forms of nontargeted video surveillance, to identify and 
apprehend suspects, particularly in emergency situations.10  See, 
e.g., United States v. Tsarnaev, 53 F. Supp. 3d 450, 458 (D. 
Mass. 2014) (describing evidence obtained from privately-owned 
surveillance camera in investigation of Boston Marathon 
bombing).  See also Commonwealth v. Leiva, 484 Mass. 766, 770 & 
                                                     
 
10 Of course, "Fourth Amendment [and art. 14] cases must be 
decided on the facts of each case, not by extravagant 
generalizations."  Commonwealth v. McCarthy, 484 Mass. 493, 508 
(2020), quoting Dow Chem. Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 238 
n.5 (1986).  Merely labeling a video camera as a security camera 
rather than a pole camera is not dispositive under art. 14.  
Instead, each instance of warrantless police surveillance, 
particularly considering the rapid advancement of technology, is 
likely to contribute different variables to our basic 
constitutional equation for determining whether a surveillance 
effort amounts to a search, i.e., whether it was so targeted and 
extensive that the data amassed thereby enabled police to expose 
otherwise unknowable details of an individual's life.  Relevant 
factors may include, without limitation, the duration of the 
surveillance; whether it was continuous or episodic in nature; 
whether the mechanism was or was not able to be monitored or 
manipulated remotely in real time; the relationship between the 
targeted persons and the place surveilled; whether there is a 
possibility of aggregating massive amounts of data 
electronically that otherwise would be difficult, if not 
impossible, for a human to compile and analyze; and the level of 
visual or other sensory detail the chosen surveillance medium 
captured. 
18 
 
 
n.5 (2020); Commonwealth v. Ferreira, 481 Mass. 641, 645 (2019); 
Commonwealth v. Boswell, 374 Mass. 263, 265-267 (1978). 
In the circumstances here, the limited pole camera 
surveillance of Mora and Suarez away from their homes did not 
collect aggregate data about the defendants over an extended 
period.  Without such data, the cameras similarly did not allow 
investigators to generate a mosaic of the defendants' private 
lives that otherwise would have been unknowable.  Cf. McCarthy, 
484 Mass. at 502.  Therefore, as we held in McCarthy, this 
limited surveillance falls within the general rule that a person 
has no reasonable expectation of privacy in what he or she 
knowingly exposes to the public. 
 
B.  Targeted surveillance of the defendants' home.  The 
long-term and continuous surveillance of Mora's and Suarez's 
homes, however, calls for a different analysis.  As we have 
assessed the constitutional significance of surveillance 
technologies, we have not lost sight of the traditional 
protections afforded to constitutionally sensitive areas such as 
the home.  See Augustine, 467 Mass. at 249 (CSLI may implicate 
greater privacy concerns than GPS vehicle tracking because it 
"clearly has the potential to track a cellular telephone user's 
location in constitutionally protected areas").  As we noted in 
McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 506, cameras placed "near 
constitutionally sensitive locations -- the home, a place of 
19 
 
 
worship, etc. -- reveal more of an individual's life and 
associations than does an ALPR trained on an interstate 
highway."  Of all these protected locations, "the home is first 
among equals."  Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1, 6 (2013). 
Protecting the home from arbitrary government invasion 
always has been a central aim of both art. 14 and the Fourth 
Amendment.  See Almonor, 482 Mass. at 43 (interpretation of art. 
14 is "informed by historical understandings of what was deemed 
an unreasonable search and seizure when [the Constitutions were] 
adopted" [citation omitted]).  These constitutional provisions 
were enacted, in large part, in "response to the reviled 
'general warrants' and 'writs of assistance' of the colonial 
era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in 
an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity" 
(citation omitted).11  Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2213.  For 
                                                     
 
 
11 Legal challenges to these general warrants recognized the 
privacy interests that were threatened by such arbitrary 
invasions of the home.  In the foundational case of Wilkes v. 
Wood, 98 Eng. Rep. 489, 490 (1763), counsel for the aggrieved 
Wilkes noted, "[O]f all offences that of a seizure of papers was 
the least capable of reparation; that, for other offences, an 
acknowledgement might make amends; but that for the promulgation 
of our most private concerns, affairs of the most secret 
personal nature, no reparation whatsoever could be made".  
Similarly, in Entick v. Carrington, 2 Wils. K.B. 275, 283 
(1765), counsel for the plaintiff objected, "[H]as a Secretary 
of State a right to see all a man's private letters of 
correspondence, family concerns, trade and business?  This would 
be monstrous indeed; and if it were lawful, no man could endure 
to live in this country." 
20 
 
 
opponents of these hated practices, "[t]he right to be secure in 
one's home was one of the principal concerns, accompanied by the 
right to a private sphere within which thoughts, beliefs, 
writings, and intimate relations were protected from outside 
inspection."  Donohue, supra at 1195.12 
 
While the drafters of the Fourth Amendment and art. 14 
undoubtedly were concerned with the physical integrity of 
persons, homes, papers, and effects for their own sake, they 
also sought to preserve the people's security to forge the 
private connections and freely exchange the ideas that form the 
bedrock of a civil society.  "Article 14, like the Fourth 
Amendment, was intended by its drafters not merely to protect 
the citizen against the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging 
of his drawers, . . . but also to protect Americans in their 
beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations by 
conferring, as against the government, the right to be let 
alone —- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most 
valued by civilized [people]" (quotations and citations 
omitted).  Commonwealth v. Blood, 400 Mass. 61, 69 (1987). 
                                                     
 
12 "The principal dictionary definitions of the word 
["secure"] have changed little in the past two hundred years.  
Samuel Johnson's dictionary offered several definitions of the 
word, including:  'free from fear'; 'sure, not doubting'; and 
'free from danger, that is, safe.'"  Clancy, What Does the 
Fourth Amendment Protect:  Property, Privacy, or Security?, 33 
Wake Forest L. R. 307, 350 (1998). 
21 
 
 
Like CSLI or GPS person tracking, targeted long-term pole 
camera surveillance of the area surrounding a residence has the 
capacity to invade the security of the home.  "'At the very 
core' of the Fourth Amendment 'stands the right of a man to 
retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable 
governmental intrusion.'"  See Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 
27, 31 (2001), quoting Silverman v. United States, 365 U.S. 505, 
511 (1961).  This "right [to be free of unreasonable government 
intrusion] would be of little practical value if the State's 
agents could stand in a home's porch or side garden and trawl 
for evidence with impunity."  Commonwealth v. Leslie, 477 Mass. 
48, 54 (2017), quoting Jardines, 569 U.S. at 6.  Similarly, even 
when pole cameras do not see into the home itself, by tracking 
who comes and goes over long periods of time, investigators are 
able to infer who is in the home, with whom the residents of the 
home meet, when, and for how long.  If the home is a "castle," a 
home that is subject to continuous, targeted surveillance is a 
castle under siege.  Although its walls may never be breached, 
its inhabitants certainly could not call themselves secure. 
Without the need to obtain a warrant, investigators could 
use pole cameras to target any home, at any time, for any 
reason.  In such a society, the traditional security of the home 
would be of little worth, and the associational and expressive 
freedoms it protects would be in peril.  See Blood, 400 Mass. 
22 
 
 
at 69 ("it is not just the right to a silent, solitary autonomy 
which is threatened by electronic surveillance:  It is the right 
to bring thoughts and emotions forth from the self in company 
with others doing likewise, the right to be known to others and 
to know them, and thus to be whole as a free member of a free 
society"); Jones, 565 U.S. at 416 (Sotomayor, J., concurring) 
("Awareness that the government may be watching chills 
associational and expressive freedoms").  Such invasive and 
arbitrary government action spurred John Adams to draft art. 14 
more than two hundred years ago, and "raises the spectre of the 
Orwellian state" today.  See United States v. Cuevas-Sanchez, 
821 F.2d 248, 251 (5th Cir. 1987). 
Despite recognizing the protected status of the home under 
art. 14, the Commonwealth nevertheless contends that pole camera 
surveillance of a single location, even a residence, cannot 
violate a reasonable expectation of privacy, because it does not 
provide the same detailed picture of a person's movements in 
public as GPS or CSLI.  To the contrary, we already have 
recognized that targeted, private video surveillance of an 
individual's home may intrude on that individual's reasonable 
expectation of privacy.  See Polay v. McMahon, 468 Mass. 379, 
384-385 (2014).  As we noted in that case, "even where an 
individual's conduct is observable by the public, the individual 
still may possess a reasonable expectation of privacy against 
23 
 
 
the use of electronic surveillance that monitors and records 
such conduct for a continuous and extended duration."  Id. 
at 384. 
The Commonwealth's argument also misapprehends the 
reasonable expectation of privacy under art. 14 that is 
implicated by location tracking technologies.  The relevant 
privacy interest is not in a person's movements themselves, but, 
rather, "a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, 
but by easy inference, of our associations -- political, 
religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few -- and of 
the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits."  
Commonwealth v. Connolly, 454 Mass. 808, 834 (2009) (Gants, J., 
concurring), quoting People v. Weaver, 12 N.Y.3d 433, 441–442 
(2009). 
Rather than focus solely on whether a surveillance 
technology tracks a person's public movements, our analysis 
under art. 14 turns on whether the surveillance was so targeted 
and extensive that the data it generated, in the aggregate, 
exposed otherwise unknowable details of a person's life.  See 
McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 503-504 (describing aggregation 
approach); Rousseau, 465 Mass. at 382 (concluding that thirty-
one days of GPS monitoring intruded on reasonable expectation of 
privacy).  Cf. Commonwealth v. Lugo, 482 Mass. 94, 108 (2019) 
(no reasonable expectation of privacy where defendant was never 
24 
 
 
targeted).  This combination of duration and aggregation in the 
targeted surveillance here is what implicates a person's 
reasonable expectation of privacy.13 
Indeed, compared to the GPS vehicle tracking in Rousseau, 
prolonged and targeted video surveillance of a home has the 
potential to generate far more data regarding a person's private 
life.  Rather than a dot on a map, video surveillance reveals 
how a person looks and behaves, with whom the residents of the 
home meet, and how they interact with others.  Pole camera 
surveillance of the home captures these revealing interactions 
at the threshold of a person's private and public life.  The 
longer the surveillance goes on, the more the boundary between 
that which is kept private, and that which is exposed to the 
public, is eroded. 
                                                     
 
13 In this respect, our analysis under art. 14 differs 
substantially from the Fourth Amendment analysis in Moore-Bush.  
There, the court concluded that there was no difference between 
defendants' privacy interests "in the whole of their movements 
over the course of eight months from continuous video recording 
with magnification and logging features in the front of their 
house," and the defendant's interest "in the front of his home."  
Moore-Bush, 963 F.3d at 38 n.8.  The court also rejected the 
notion that the "unrelenting, 24/7, perfect" nature of the pole 
camera surveillance altered its constitutional analysis.  See 
id. at 42.  Conversely, we have held that "when the duration of 
digital surveillance drastically exceeds what would have been 
possible with traditional law enforcement methods, that 
surveillance constitutes a search under art. 14."  McCarthy, 484 
Mass. at 500. 
25 
 
 
In this case, for uninterrupted periods of five months and 
two months, respectively, pole cameras were targeted at Mora's 
and Suarez's residences.  These cameras videotaped not only Mora 
and Suarez, but also every person who visited their homes, and 
every activity that took place in the immediate vicinity.  
Because of the focused and prolonged nature of this pole camera 
surveillance, investigators were able to uncover the defendants' 
private behaviors, patterns and associations.  Indeed, beginning 
with Mora, investigators used pole camera surveillance footage, 
in combination with other information, to identify the 
codefendants allegedly engaged in his drug-distribution network. 
We are not swayed by the Commonwealth's argument that this 
same aggregate data could have been collected by an officer 
conducting direct surveillance.  When considering the 
capabilities of the police to conduct such surveillance, our 
"overarching goal is to assure [the] preservation of that degree 
of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth 
Amendment [and art. 14] were adopted" (quotations and citation 
omitted).  McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 498.  As with the GPS tracking 
in Jones, "it is almost impossible to think of late–18th-century 
situations that are analogous to what took place in this case."  
565 U.S. at 420 (Alito, J., concurring).  In a literal sense, 
replicating pole camera surveillance "would have required either 
a very large [pole], a very tiny constable, or both -— not to 
26 
 
 
mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience."  
See id. at 420 n.3. 
Even if "[p]hysical surveillance, in theory, could gather 
the same information as the pole cameras," it remains the case 
that "physical surveillance is difficult to perform."  United 
States vs. Garcia-Gonzalez, U.S. Dist. Ct., No. CR 14-10296-LTS, 
slip op. at 6 (D. Mass. Sept. 1, 2015).  Further, it seems 
unlikely that investigators could have maintained in-person 
observation over the course of multiple months without the 
defendants becoming aware of their presence.  See McCarthy, 484 
Mass at 500 ("the surreptitious nature of digital surveillance 
removes a natural obstacle to too permeating a police presence 
by hiding the extent of that surveillance").  And replacing 
officers on the ground with a single, automatic, remotely-
operated surveillance camera eliminated resource constraints 
that otherwise may have rendered this surveillance unfeasible.  
See McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 499-500, quoting Jones, 565 U.S. at 
429 (Alito, J., concurring) ("Traditional surveillance for any 
extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore 
rarely undertaken").  Unlike a police officer, a pole camera 
does not need to eat or sleep, nor does it have family or 
professional concerns to pull its gaze away from its target.  
The "continuous, twenty-four hour nature of the surveillance" is 
27 
 
 
an "enhancement[] of what reasonably might be expected from the 
police."  McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 508. 
Thus, the pole cameras here allowed investigators to 
overcome several practical challenges to pervasive human 
surveillance.  See McCarthy, supra at 499, quoting Jones, supra 
at 429 (Alito, J., concurring) ("In the pre-computer age, the 
greatest protections of privacy were neither constitutional nor 
statutory, but practical"). 
Even assuming that investigators otherwise could have 
conducted months of human surveillance without being discovered, 
these pole cameras captured information that a police officer 
conducting in-person surveillance could not.  All of the footage 
collected by the cameras was stored digitally, in a searchable 
format, such that investigators later could comb through it at 
will.  The pole cameras thereby gave investigators the ability 
to "pick out and identify individual, sensitive moments that 
would otherwise be lost to the natural passage of time."  
Levinson-Waldman, Hiding in Plain Sight:  A Fourth Amendment 
Framework for Analyzing Government Surveillance in Public, 66 
Emory L.J. 527, 603 (2017).  See McCarthy, 484 Mass. at 500 
(noting that camera surveillance allows police to "travel back 
in time" [citation omitted]).  "Far more so than watching in 
real time, creating a recording enables the extraction of a host 
of interconnected inferences about an individual's associations, 
28 
 
 
proclivities, and more.  Indeed, recording often will be the 
only way to create a mosaic, since the ability to construct a 
mosaic depends on the compilation of enough data points -- more 
than human memory can hold --to yield the big picture."  See 
Levinson-Waldman, supra at 568.  The resulting mosaic is "a 
category of information that never would be available through 
the use of traditional law enforcement tools of investigation."  
Augustine, 467 Mass. at 254. 
All told, the targeted, long-duration pole camera 
surveillance of Mora's and Suarez's homes provided the police 
with a far richer profile of those defendants' lives than would 
have been possible through human surveillance.  A reasonable 
person must anticipate that a neighbor could observe some of the 
comings and goings from his or her residence.  Even the 
prototypical nosey neighbor, Gladys Kravitz from the 1960s 
television show, "Bewitched," however, occasionally put down her 
binoculars and abandoned her post at the window to eat and 
sleep.14  We do not believe that a resident would expect that 
every activity would be taped, stored, and later analyzed as 
part of a months-long pattern of behavior.  A briefer period of 
pole camera use, or one that is not targeted at a home, might 
                                                     
 
 
14 Bewitched:  Be it Ever So Mortgaged (ABC television 
broadcast Sept. 24, 1964). 
29 
 
 
not implicate the same reasonable expectation of privacy.15  We 
need not decide in this case where that boundary lies.  It is 
enough to conclude that the warrantless surveillance of Mora's 
and Suarez's residences for more than two months was a "search" 
under art. 14.  In the future, before engaging in this kind of 
prolonged surveillance, investigators must obtain a warrant 
based on probable cause. 
As we announce this new rule, we also recognize that police 
departments across the country have used pole cameras, without 
the need for a warrant, for at least three decades.  See Cuevas-
Sanchez, 821 F.2d at 251-252 (describing pole camera 
surveillance).  At the time of the investigation here, the 
majority of courts that had assessed pole camera surveillance 
had concluded that it did not violate a reasonable expectation 
of privacy.  See, e.g. Tafoya, 2019COA176 at ¶ 33 (summarizing 
prior decisions).  Indeed, in the closest decision on point at 
that time, Bucci, 582 F.3d at 116–117, the United States Court 
of Appeals for the First Circuit held that the pole camera 
surveillance of the home there was not a search under the Fourth 
Amendment. 
                                                     
 
 
15 Of course, exceptions to the warrant requirement, such as 
exigent circumstances, apply with full force to pole camera 
surveillance that otherwise would be an unreasonable search. 
30 
 
 
 
In Augustine, 467 Mass. at 256, when announcing a new rule 
regarding the warrant requirement for extended CSLI surveillance, 
we did not hold that the CSLI gathered in that case automatically 
was subject to the exclusionary rule.  Rather, we recognized that 
the Commonwealth had obtained a court order authorizing the 
compelled product of the CSLI pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) of 
the Stored Communications Act, and consistently had maintained 
that the "affidavit submitted in support of the Commonwealth's 
application for a § 2703(d) order demonstrated the requisite 
probable cause."  See Augustine, supra.  In light of these 
circumstances, the Commonwealth was accorded an opportunity to 
establish that the warrantless government-compelled production of 
data in that case was supported by probable cause.  See id. at 
255–256.  Because of the long-standing use and judicial approval 
of pole camera surveillance, we conclude that remand similarly is 
appropriate here to determine "whether, in the particular 
circumstances of this case, the Commonwealth is able to meet that 
warrant requirement through a demonstration of probable cause."  
Commonwealth v. Augustine, 472 Mass. 448, 449 (2015). 
 
On remand, the motion judge, at an appropriate hearing, must 
consider whether, at the time the pole camera surveillance began, 
the Commonwealth had "probable cause to believe that a 
particularly described offense has been, is being, or is about to 
be committed, and that [pole camera footage sought] will produce 
31 
 
 
evidence of such offense or will aid in the apprehension of a 
person who the applicant has probable cause to believe has 
committed, is committing, or is about to commit such offense"  
(quotations and citation omitted). Augustine, 467 Mass. at 255–
256.  Although, unlike in Augustine, supra, the Commonwealth did 
not submit applications, supported by affidavits, to conduct the 
electronic surveillance at issue in this case, it nonetheless may 
be able to establish probable cause through affidavits submitted 
in support of warrants it did obtain during the course of the 
investigation, such as for wiretaps.  Alternatively, the 
Commonwealth may meet its burden through supplemental affidavits 
and other relevant evidence it may seek to proffer at a new 
evidentiary hearing.  If the Commonwealth can show that 
investigators had probable cause when each of the pole cameras 
was installed, and thus were not acting in a wholly arbitrary 
manner, the motions to suppress should be denied in their 
entirety.  If not, the motions should be allowed only as to the 
surveillance of Mora and Suarez by the cameras targeted at their 
residences. 
 
3.  Conclusion.  The matter is remanded to the Superior 
Court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So ordered.