Picture a Nashville warehouse supervisor. He is a churchgoer, soccer dad, and cardiology patient. No criminal record. No active investigation. But over the past two years, a private company’s license plate readers and cellular data aggregators have quietly assembled a record of nearly everywhere he’s been. Under current Tennessee law, a government official can query that record without asking a judge, establishing probable cause, or explaining why.
This is the current standard practice. House Bill 2608 and Senate Bill 2215, the Protecting Everyone from Excessive Police Surveillance (PEEPS) Act, would change it by requiring law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing Tennesseans’ historical location data.
A Constitutional Principle, Not a Political One
The United States Constitution is not a partisan document. Conservatives and progressives alike should want to protect our Fourth Amendment right from unreasonable searches and seizures.
The search and seizure of your digital data is no different. In 2018, the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States confirmed what common sense already suggested: accessing digital location data, which creates a comprehensive, searchable record of a person’s movements, constitutes a search requiring a warrant. Government agencies should not be able to compile years of precise location records and query them at will without judicial oversight. If they can, that is the architecture of a surveillance state. The Fourth Amendment was written to prevent exactly this scenario.
What the Law Enforcement Objection Gets Wrong
The “dangerous delay” argument doesn’t survive scrutiny. Telephonic and electronic warrants are issued in minutes. The requirement applies only to felony investigations involving data older than 24 hours. And when genuine emergencies arise, kidnappings, active shooters, any situation where every second counts, the warrant requirement doesn’t apply.
The bill doesn’t limit investigations. It limits fishing expeditions. If there isn’t probable cause to bring before a judge to obtain a warrant, there isn’t probable cause to build a case.
Accountability and enforcement in the PEEPS Act have teeth. Evidence obtained unlawfully without a warrant is inadmissible. Violations will trigger escalating database suspensions: seven days, thirty days, and then permanent revocation. The bill prohibits governmental entities from selling location data to private third parties. These are constitutional rules that ought to be enforced.
This Belongs to Every Tennessean
For conservatives, the PEEPS Act is a limited-government issue: the state should not maintain a permanent record of law-abiding citizens’ movements. For progressives, it is an accountability issue: warrantless surveillance of communities that have historically faced aggressive policing concentrates power without oversight. Both concerns are legitimate, and both are answered by this bill.
The Nashville warehouse supervisor is not a suspect. He has done nothing wrong. His data should not be susceptible to unconstitutional searches. But right now, the data broker has his location history, the government can access it at will, and he will never know it happened. HB 2608 and SB 2215 say a judge must sign off first, and probable cause must be proven. That protection belongs to every Tennessean, regardless of politics.
Commercial surveillance technology has outpaced the law for too long. The databases have been built. The algorithms have gotten faster. The queries have gotten cheaper. The constitutional guardrails have not kept pace. Tennessee has the opportunity to change that this session. HB 2608 and SB 2215 offer a clear, enforceable rule: in this state, the government must go to a judge before it tracks your whereabouts. That is a fundamental rule of law. The General Assembly should pass the PEEPS Act. Innocent Tennesseans have been unknowingly and unconstitutionally tracked for long enough.
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Justan Rice is Director of State Government Affairs at the Libertas Institute, a liberty-focused policy organization that advances individual freedom through research and advocacy across all 50 states.
Do they have nothing better to do? Seems like a waste of resources that could be used elsewhere. I am originally from TN.
The law should specify that ALL information older than 30 days is to be automatically erased and no backups are to be kept.