It’s surveillance month! In this homebound briefing, I pose several ethical questions relevant to surveillance operatives.
While we’re quarantined, we’re polishing a new ethics course for PI Education — updates on that soon. In the meantime, we’ve mashed together ethics and surveillance in this briefing and come up with a few common ethical issues surveillance operatives commonly face.
Consider these questions and chime in with your answers in the comments:
- In a domestic/custody case, the client is out of town for the weekend. He wants to find out if his soon-to-be ex is using drugs at the house while their minor children are staying with her. Can you install a camera inside the house? In the backyard or by the pool, inside a privacy fence? Or in the garage?
- In another case, you want to photograph the subject in their backyard. If the fence is too high to see unless you climb onto the car or peek over the fence, can you shoot video then? What about lifting your camera over the fence on a pole? What about using a drone?
The Briefing:
note: My hair is only gonna get wilder from here on out. Please bear with it.