This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

A U.S. District Court judge is set to rule by Friday on an ACLU lawsuit that seeks to block the Baltimore Police Department from using airborne surveillance images via the city’s controversial Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) pilot program.

Three privately funded planes would fly over Baltimore, up to 84 hours weekly, for six-months under a contract between the Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems and the Baltimore Police Department, beginning in May. The planes, equipped with a sophisticated 192-megapixel full-color camera system (named HawkEye), would capture images of people’s outside movements on Baltimore streets and sidewalks, as well as their own backyards, according to ACLU and police department legal briefs focused on the constitutionality of the program.

The city’s Board of Estimates approved the contract and pilot project now in federal court by a 3-2 vote three weeks ago. Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, who controls the majority of votes on the Board of Estimates, voted to greenlight the initiative. City Council President Brandon Scott, among those running against Young for mayor in upcoming Democratic primary, does not support the surveillance program—or “spy planes”—as the effort is often derided.

The stated objective of the initiative is to help the Baltimore Police Department investigate murders, shootings, armed robberies, and carjackings with collected surveillance images. Baltimore, which has witnessed more than 300 homicides in each of the last five years, is essentially serving as a test case for potentially similar surveillance initiatives in other cities, the ACLU says.

Baltimore City has become a constitutional battleground for national public privacy issues.

The constitutional and civil rights dispute coincides with the fifth anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death from injuries suffered while in police custody on April 19, 2015, with subsequent riots and weeks of protests. The following year, as city anti-police brutality activists protested a not-guilty verdict handed down for police officer Caesar Goodson, Jr.—the driver of the van in which Gray was detained—aerial surveillance was being secretly conducted by the same company and Baltimore Police Department.

That publicly undisclosed program, first reported by Bloomsberg Businessweek after a tweet inquiring about the strange constant circling of planes overhead, was halted in 2016 amid criticism of its secrecy and condemnations from civil liberties advocates who made the case that the system represents a sweeping overreach of surveillance that violates individuals’ rights.

The new effort has already run test flights to collect aerial imagery as part of the program’s restart, court filings show. But the BPD agreed to temporarily suspend any current flights while awaiting the federal ruling expected by the end of this week. Meanwhile, Baltimore City has become a constitutional battleground for national public privacy issues.

If sanctioned by the federal court, Baltimore would become the first U.S. city to formally approve and implement military-style technology known as Wide Area Persistent Surveillance in an effort to fight crime, likely opening the door for further surveillance programs in Baltimore and elsewhere.

“What happens here would set a precedent for what happens in the rest of the nation,” Jay Stanley, a senior ACLU national policy analyst, said during an ACLU virtual press conference earlier this month. “This is one of the biggest privacy issues I’ve seen come down the pike.”

David Rocah, an ACLU of Maryland senior staff attorney, went further, comparing the effort to those found in dystopian novels. “Baltimore’s spy plane program, or Wide Area Persistent Surveillance, is an Orwellian nightmare come to life,” Rocah said.

In a flurry of legal briefs, motions, and responses filed last week, ACLU and Baltimore Police Department lawyers argued whether such aerial surveillance violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, an individual’s right to free speech and assembly, and the Fourth Amendment—primarily the freedom from government searches deemed unreasonable under the law.

Under the proposed pilot, aerial cameras would collect imagery data up to 12 hours a day over “major portions” of the city, weather permitting, with “a resolution of roughly one pixel per person,” according to the BPD. Such images could be checked against other city surveillance technologies, including CitiWatch cameras, license plate readers, and a web of visual data police say could identify the suspects or witnesses present at a crime scene.

Police leaders contend today’s AIR pilot program would ensure privacy limits and transparency, partly via potential “robust independent” evaluations by Morgan State University, the RAND Corporation, and University of Baltimore.

Baltimore’s police department has a documented, long-troubled civil rights history. A U.S. Department of Justice report in 2016 found the BPD engaged in patterns of conduct that violated the Constitution’s First and Fourth Amendments, leading to a consent decree detailing reforms. Such reforms emphasize building a “bond of trust” between the community and police.

Erricka Bridgeford, co-founder of the Baltimore Ceasefire project and a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit, believes the AIR program would further erode community trust, and that aerial surveillance will hinder community outreach efforts. “[The police department] should not have access to advanced technology,” she said, that creates an opportunity “to violate people’s rights. Also, I think it undermines the work that good officers are trying to do in the community.”

On Tuesday, a Morgan State survey reported city residents’ widespread dissatisfaction with police.

BPD has said the pilot program would comply with the consent decree. Under the contract, Persistent Surveillance Systems will analyze captured images when requested by police for investigations into targeted, violent crimes. Collected images can be scanned backward and forward in time. The BPD says it will not conduct live surveillance day-to-day in coordination with the company operating the planes. That said, Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael S. Harrison also has discretion to request data analysis under “extraordinary and exigent” circumstances.

“Though the program’s objectives to reduce crime and violence are laudable, the Constitution dictates that this all-seeing and ever-present ‘eye in the sky’ is not an available solution.”

The ACLU contended in its request for a preliminary injunction earlier this month that the program would create “the most-wide reaching surveillance dragnet ever employed in an American city, giving the BPD a virtual, visual time machine whose grasp no person can escape.”

The century-old civil rights organization said that “though the program’s objectives to reduce crime and violence are laudable, the Constitution dictates that this all-seeing and ever-present ‘eye in the sky’ is not an available solution.”

Baltimore Police Department attorneys have countered by citing past court rulings on aerial photography use in investigations, most from the 1980s prior to recent advances in technologies. In response to the ACLU suit, BPD emphasized program support by several local churches and a city “level of violent crime that has reached tragic proportions,” including 348 homicides in 2019. BPD called the aerial surveillance “simply a creative, technological assist.”

The estimated nearly $3.7 million cost of the pilot would be funded by Arnold Ventures, a limited liability corporation founded by Texas philanthropists John Arnold, a former Enron executive and hedge fund manager, and his wife, attorney Laura Arnold. Future costs or funding support remain unclear.

Former Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon, who is running again for mayor, supports the surveillance plane pilot. Former city police department spokesman T.J. Smith, former state deputy attorney general Thiru Vignarajah, and former U.S. Treasury official Mary Miller—all running for mayor—support the pilot program. The Arnolds have made significant contributions to Vignarajah’s campaign.

“It is not BPD’s burden to show that the AIR program is constitutional at this stage,” Baltimore Police Department attorneys argued in their filing, noting the city is already surveilled by police helicopters, speed and red light cameras, as well as CCTV, CitiWatch, and the private security systems in nearly every neighborhood. “Observations of public movements are expected in Baltimore,” police department attorneys stated. “It cannot be that the public recognizes the abundance of cameras potentially capturing their activities in the public thoroughfare and still maintains a ‘reasonable’ expectation of privacy.”

The ACLU says aerial surveillance that spans up to 90 percent of the city is unique and goes too far.

“Yes, you are traveling public roads, but this program tracks all of it on a widespread scale,” Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said in a recent interview. “The government can do this if it gets a warrant, but there’s no warrant that can be authorized for that kind of collection for 600,000 people in the city.”

“The government is capturing the whole of an individual’s movements,” Gorski continued. “They can capture everything you are doing, exposing the privacy of how you live your life, if you go to the pharmacy or a gay bar or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”

“[The government can] capture everything you are doing, exposing the privacy of how you live your life, if you go to the pharmacy or a gay bar or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”

On a broader legal scale, the court battle reveals how case law and U.S. Constitution interpretations often lag behind rapidly changing technologies.

Central to the ACLU’s argument is a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case, Carpenter v. United States, which ruled that police access to a person’s cell phone location data without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. The Baltimore Police Department argues that cell phone tracking (via data generated when a mobile phone communicates with a cell tower) is not the same as aerial surveillance. Wide Area Surveillance cameras in general, however, have a range of capabilities, including the ability to capture higher resolution, zoom, and long-term real-time images, as outlined in a U.S. Department of Homeland Security report.

Such technologies can also be used via drones.

The ACLU says it understands crime-fighting concerns, yet also sees widespread potential for abuse.

“The city is fearful, feeling like there are a lack of viable solutions to the crime problem, so people are turning to technology to be a panacea,” Gorski said. “But the costs are far too high.”

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J. Cavanaugh Simpson is a freelance journalist based in the Baltimore area. This article was supported in part by a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center. Simpson can be contacted via Twitter @JoCavanaughSim1.

Ben Jealous, the son of former Baltimore City school teachers and a former NAACP president, handily beat Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination Tuesday.

Jealous, an unabashed progressive with support from the Maryland teachers union and Sen. Bernie Sanders, will face off against incumbent Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, presenting voters with a clear choice in November. Despite a 2-1 Democratic advantage in registered voters in the state, Jealous is expected to have his work cut out in challenging Hogan, whose approval ratings have consistently ranked in the mid-60s during his first term. Unopposed in the Republican primary, Hogan also starts the general election campaign with a nearly $8 million fundraising lead on Jealous.

“Hogan will lose because he doesn’t know how run to against some who can build people-powered grassroots campaign,” Jealous told supporters at his campaign’s victory party at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore.

Jealous will certainly try to tie Hogan, considered a moderate Republican, to the head of his party, President Donald Trump, who received just under 34 percent of the vote in Maryland in 2016.

“A [Jealous] vs. [Hogan] race isn’t just interesting nationally because of what Jealous represents for the future of the Dem Party,” Goucher College political science professor Mileah Kromer commented on Twitter last night, “it’s also what Hogan represents for the future of Republican Party.”

In another high-profile primary race Tuesday, incumbent Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby won another four-year term, defeating defense attorney Ivan Bates and former prosecutor Thiru Vignarajah, who essentially split the opposition vote. Mosby tallied just less than 50 percent support of Democratic voters with 96 percent of the precincts reporting last night.

Mosby became a national figure in 2015 after filing charges against six city police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray, who died while in custody and maintained the support of numerous Baltimore political leaders, including Rep. Elijah Cummings, former Rep. Kweisi Mfume, and Mayor Catherine Pugh.

In Baltimore County, the Democratic nomination for county executive remained in a three-way deadlock after voting ended. Former Del. John Olszewski Jr., state Sen. Jim Brochin and County Councilwoman Vicki Almond posted 33.1 percent, 32.7 percent, and 31.8 percent of vote with more than 98 percent of the vote counted last night. However, a significant number of provisional ballots—nobody will know until July 5 how many—were likely cast yesterday after the Department of Motor Vehicles announced they failed to update the registrations of 80,000 voters over the past year. In the GOP nomination for Baltimore County executive, Insurance Commissioner Al Redmer easily defeated state Del. Pat McDonough.

In city state senate races, two incumbents, Nathan McFadden in East Baltimore, and Barbara Robinson in West Baltimore, lost to challenges from younger state delegates, Del. Cory McCray and Del. Antonio Hayes, respectively. Another state delegate, Del. Mary Washington appeared to be on the verge of upsetting state Sen. Joan Conway with 96 percent of the voting in Tuesday.

In another high-profile state senate race, Sen. Jill Carter held off a challenge from former school teacher J.D. Merrill, the son-in-law of former mayor and governor Martin O’Malley.

In a state house race that garnered regional and even some national attention, state Del. Robbyn Lewis, a public health expert and the first African-American woman to represent District 46, exceeded expectations in easily fending off a big-money challenge by newcomer Nate Loewentheil, a former Obama Administration official.

With 80 percent of the vote, U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin won the Democratic primary in his bid to return to Capitol Hill. He’ll be challenged by Tony Campbell, an author, minister, and political science professor at Towson University.

In District 6, the only open congressional seat in Maryland, Democrat David Trone, who spent nearly $12 million, will face defense consultant Republican Amie Hoeber, who also won GOP’s 2016 nomination. Rep. John Delaney is resigning his seat in a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in two years.

With record numbers over the eight days of early voting in Maryland—a 57 percent increase from the last primary election in 2014—polling places throughout the city experienced shorter lines and wait times today. When the polls opened at 7 a.m., local politicians and campaign staffers were there to eagerly greet voters for the 2018 Maryland primary election.

Del. Brooke Lierman—who is one-fourth of the district 46 team including senator Bill Ferguson, and delegates Luke Clippinger and Robbyn Lewis—was out bright and early to greet voters at William Paca Elementary School in Patterson Park.

Lierman also believes that this primary election may be the turning point for major change within the city. She says that residents are more focused than ever on all of the major issues in the city and are ready to put leaders in places they believe will do some good.

“It’s been good to see people coming out,” she said. “We face big challenges here in Baltimore City and there’s a lot of work to be done at the state level and we need proven leaders who have shown that they can be effective.”

The climate amongst voters at William Paca today was split. There were some who enthusiastically cast their votes for their favorite candidates, while others said they were simply fulfilling their civic duty, with no feelings one way or another about the pool of candidates.

“I feel good about who I voted for,” said Patterson Park resident Marissa Fleming after exiting the polling place. “I’m exercising my right, so my voice will be heard and I’m hoping they can do some good for the area.”

Earl Jones, who registered to vote today, did so because he believes this is the only way to help evoke change in his community. While he’s not particularly pleased with the campaigns he’s been following, he’s hopeful that there is a “diamond in the rough” among politicians running.

“We need someone that’s really going to work and be out here with us and active in all the communities,” he said. “I will be able to vote in November now, and I’m hoping that the right candidates make it to that ballot. I know [voting] is something that needs to be done to help my city.”

Eileen Del Valle, feels that it’s not only her civic duty to get out to the polls, but it’s also important to teach her 4-year-old daughter the importance of making her voice heard.

“She comes with me all the time, this is her third time now,” Del Valle said. “I want to get her excited about doing her duty early.”

With some races heating up in the city—namely the state’s attorney’s race with Ivan Bates suing State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Thiru Vignarajah for defamation—some voters have been turned off by the smear campaigns and negativity.

“It’s gotten pretty nasty, especially towards the end,” said Nelson Vasconcelos. “It just muddies the water. It affects my voting to a degree, I mean I know who I wasn’t voting for in the state’s attorney’s race, but it did affect who I ultimately voted for.”

To add another layer of drama to election day, a computer glitch at the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) has caused as many as 80,000 Marylanders to cast provisional ballots today. It affects residents who tried to change their address or party affiliation through the MVA since 2017. When these residents show up to vote, the correct information will not be available, however no one will be turned away. Those voters will be given a provisional ballot that will be counted on July 5.

On Monday, Democratic legislative leaders called for the immediate resignation of MVA administrator Christine Nizer, who oversees the agency that failed to forward voter information to the Maryland Board of Elections. Gov. Larry Hogan has ordered an audit to find out what went wrong.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” Lierman said of the glitch. “This is one of MVA’s core jobs—to make sure they are an entry point to registering. We will be having oversight hearings to figure out what happened and demanding that Gov. Hogan make some changes to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We need to make sure every single vote is counted.”

The polls will be open until 8 p.m. tonight.

In deep blue Baltimore, the primaries held later this month, for all intents and purposes, will decide much of the city’s elected leadership. That means today is an important deadline for voters: It is the last day for Marylanders to register for the upcoming June 26 contests.

(In order to cast a ballot in Maryland, voters must register at least 21 days before the next election.)

Also important: Maryland’s primaries are closed, which means voters must be registered with a party affiliation to cast a ballot later this month. Today is also the last day to change political affiliation if you are already registered to vote.

The good news? Registering or changing affiliation just takes a few minutes online. Simply head to the State Board of Election’s website, scroll to your local (Baltimore City or county) board of elections, and then follow links to voter info and voter registration.

To submit a registration electronically, voters must provide a valid Maryland-issued state ID number or driver’s license number. It’s too late to register by mail, but you can also still register in-person this afternoon in Baltimore until 4:30 p.m. at The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

In Baltimore, major races include the battle for city state’s attorney general where incumbent Marilyn Mosby faces challenges from defense attorney Ivan Bates and Thiru Vignarajah, a former deputy attorney general for Maryland.

The biggest race this year, of course, is for governor. According to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released Tuesday morning, former NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has jumped past Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III and ahead of the rest of the Democratic pack.

Jealous, who had been trailing Baker during the primary season to date, now leads Baker among likely Democratic voters 21 percent to 16 percent. The rest of the field, Valerie Ervin, Rich Mandaleno, Jim Shea, Krish Vignarajah, and Alec Ross, track from 8 percent to 2 percent support. However, the largest percentage of the vote—39 percent—remains up for grabs.

Meanwhile, incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan, running unopposed in the Republican primary, maintains broad support, with a 71 percent job-approval rating, including nearly two-thirds approval among Democrats.

Races up for also grabs also include the state delegate and state senate positions—all of Maryland’s congressional seats—and one the state’s U.S. Senate positions where Sen. Ben Cardin is running for re-election.

In Baltimore City, other contests include Clerk of the Circuit Court, Register of Wills, Judge of the Orphan’s Court, Sheriff, and Democratic and Republican Central Committee seats.

Anyone with siblings knows that besting a brother or sister in sports or winning your parents praise is like a nagging intuition that only grows with age. Thiru and Krishanti Vignarajah are living proof that sibling rivalries never die. One is running for Baltimore state’s attorney and the other is vying to unseat Gov. Larry Hogan. As the children of two immigrant Baltimore City Public School teachers, Thiru and Krishanti are the epitome of the American dream.

After their parents fled civil unrest in Sri Lanka, they sought refuge in the Edmondson Heights neighborhood in Baltimore City. Thiru went on to pursue law at Harvard—becoming the editor of the Harvard Law Review “before Barack Obama made it cool.” And his younger sister, Krishanti, studied political science and molecular cellular and developmental biology at Yale, eventually becoming the policy director for Michelle Obama at the White House. Although wildly successful, the pair says that there was never any pressure from their parents to go to college and do well.

“If you ask my father, he would tell you, they didn’t really know of the Ivy League, and they always kind of encouraged us to realize our potential,” Krishanti said. “But it was never sort of pressure. It was never, ‘You will go to a top notch academic institution.’ I think there was an expectation that we would make something of ourselves and find some way to give back.” 

Neither Krishanti nor Thiru had ever thought about running for public office. For Thiru, it was the Uprising in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray that piqued his interest in politics. As a former Maryland deputy attorney general, he witnessed firsthand how the increased violence and homicide rates in Baltimore were tearing communities apart.

“It was just gut wrenching and heart breaking,” Thiru said. “I suddenly realized that it was not going to get better unless we had real leadership in the role of the state’s attorney. I just couldn’t sit back and watch anymore.”

For Krishanti, she was asked to run following a keynote address at the Western Maryland Democratic Summit in April 2017 (and was eight months pregnant at the time). A political consultant approached her and said, “You’re not going to like me in five minutes. You’re going to hate me in five months,” and showed Krishanti a crumpled piece of paper with names on it.

“She says, ‘None of these candidates could beat governor Hogan. Fortunately, I’ve just found my candidate. I just need to wait until she delivers her baby,’” she recalls. “It kind of gave me pause. Part of that pause was that, coming out of the Obama administration, and having so many of the accomplishments we worked so hard to achieve either already reversed or threatened to be reversed, made me believe that we needed to be part of the resistance and opposition. Part of it was I was nearly nine months pregnant.”

Now, nearly six weeks away from the primaries, the brother and sister are ready to acknowledge their familial ties within the race. After keeping their relationship out of the race in an effort to “keep the focus on the issues at hand,” Thiru freely prattled on about his admiration for his little sister and all of her accomplishments.

“She’s extraordinary and we have a sibling rivalry like everybody else but there’s no one I would trust more with the biggest responsibilities on the Earth,” he said. “She is as humble as she is brilliant, she is as hardworking as she is charming.”

Neither sibling can ignore the elephant in the room—if they both win their respective seats, will there be a conflict of interest? Baltimore is known for its history of political families—Mitchells, Cardins, Mosbys—but aside from having a longer name, Thiru believes that they are the same as other families that have served. 

“If a brother and sister didn’t disagree, nobody would believe it,” he joked. “There will be issues and subjects in which we may disagree, and we’ll talk about it and we’ll move forward. In some respects, that’s what I would say about a person in government that wasn’t family.”

When the fancy titles are stripped away, and politics are out of the picture, Thiru and Krishanti are just Woodlawn High graduates who enjoy being on the water or taking in a game at Camden Yards. At the end of the day, they are just a brother and sister, who are hoping for the best outcomes for each other in the June 26 primary.

“I’m inspired and proud of what Krish is doing,” Thiru said. “There is a moment that is seizing the country and I think both of us feel this calling. It’s rooted in our unique experiences, we have walked our distinctive paths, but if not now, when? If not here, where? If not us, who?”