this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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Unless you’re self hosting your own cameras, just don’t. If you don’t control the data then it’s somebody else’s camera.
What are the laws about search warrants around home cameras and the 5th amendment?
I’ve thought about setting up old smart phone based IP cameras around my house facing out windows. But decided that if it comes down to arresting people for anti regime speech, that having cameras with background audio of private conversations wasn’t a good idea.
I’m not sure it matters if it’s legal or not anymore these days.
Still, they can legally demand any recordings from you if they reasonably can know that such recordings exist. Generally they will need a warrant or they may subpoena you for the evidence that they know you have. You can even be arrested for erasing your own footage as destruction of evidence.
Obligatory statement that I am not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice.
They can only get it with a search warrant. If everything is encrypted with a sufficiently strong password, I think the court precedent is that they can't compel you to reveal the password.
To get a warrant, they need to convince a judge that it's necessary to prove guilt in a specific crime, which means they need at least reasonable suspicion before even asking for the footage.
Yeah, really my question should have been about encrypted footage and my 5th amendment to protecting the password to the footage.
Hopefully no one needs to test this to find out.
The question for smartphones has been tried in court IIRC. Basically, police can compel you to unlock your phone with biometrics, but cannot compel you to unlock it if it's a password, and the difference is your fingerprint is something you have, whereas a password is something you know. Your fingerprint is subject to the fourth amendment and your password is subject to the fifth.
So when it comes to video footage, the password is protected, so they'd need to break the encryption or the password, they couldn't compel you to reveal it.