Maine lobsterman Frank Thompson has asked the United States Supreme Court to weigh in on his challenge of a regulation requiring that tracking devices on lobstering vessels be operated 24/7 while in the water.
The mandated devices identify a vessel’s location every sixty seconds while in motion and once every six hours when stationary. Using one of these devices, a boat’s position can be accurately determined within 100 meters, or 328.1 feet.
It is argued in the lawsuit that this new requirement violates the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments because it allegedly jeopardizes constitutionally protected rights to privacy and due process.
Back in March of 2022, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) updated its fisheries management plan (FMP) to require continuous electronic tracking devices be installed on all federally permitted lobstering vessels.
Following this, in September of 2023, the Maine Department of Marine Resources (MDMR) initiated rulemaking procedures to bring state regulations into agreement with the new ASMFC requirements.
The electronic tracking mandate in question has its roots in a one-year pilot program that was started in February of 2018 and required that all federally permitted vessels self-report a handful of data points.
According to the original complaint, this pilot program only required lobstermen to report information such as the National Marine Fisheries Service statistical area, lobster management area, and 10-minute square level of their trips — not their precise location or route.
Unlike the minute-by-minute data shared by the tracking devices, the information collected as part of the pilot program was far less specific, indicating only the generalized area in which a given trip was conducted.
It was suggested at the time that the more granular-level data collected by the tracking devices would be a necessary upgrade, but the lobstermen argued otherwise.
“The MDMR Rule’s requirement of a twenty-four-hour-a-day vessel tracker is an unreasonable search and seizure and a violation of due process under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution,” the original complaint alleged.
In November 2025, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling against the lobstermen and in favor of the policy’s validity under the Fourth Amendment, arguing that the rule constitutes an administrative search in a closely regulated industry and is therefore permissible under court precedent.
To make this determination, the court applied the three-part test established in the case of New York v. Burger, which can be used to decide if a warrantless administrative search is permissible in a closely regulated industry.
Under the Burger test, such searches are allowed only if the regulatory scheme underpinning them serves a “substantial” government interest, warrantless inspections are “necessary to further” that scheme, and the scheme provides “a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant.”
Thompson contends in his petition to the Supreme Court that the First Circuit’s ruling “deepened a split between the Tenth Circuit and the Ninth and Sixth Circuits over whether the reasonableness of the government’s warrantless trespass on private property—outside of commercial areas, hours, and operations—should be judged under the Fourth Amendment’s core trespass-to-property protections or under an administrative search doctrine.”
Maine disagreed with this interpretation, however, arguing that no such split exists and that the First Circuit’s application of the relevant legal tests is in no way inconsistent with what other courts have done in the past.
[RELATED: Maine Lobstermen Lose Legal Fight As Court Upholds Federal Boat-Tracking Regulation]
The Supreme Court has distributed this case for conference in late September of this year, as indicated on the case’s official docket. Justices have not yet decided whether or not to grant review of this case.
Got to know where we all are all the time. Fits with the proposed mandatory OBD2 tracking unit they want plugged into ever vehicles OBD2 test ports . . .F them!