Tobias Russell is a strategic research manager at the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing Frank Thompson.
Eating enough lobster could kill me; eating even a little could ruin my day. Nevertheless, I took two flights and drove 85 miles up the rainy Maine coast to get from Sacramento to the Maine Lobster Festival.
My work usually takes me to public policy conferences. This time, I found myself sitting in a sprawling market, surrounded by vendors selling lobster rolls, jewelry and coffee.
But my booth wasn’t handing out lobster. It had free sunglasses, stickers and a large sign that read: “The lobster on your plate had more privacy than the person who caught it.”
I was there because many of the lobstermen supplying the festival must keep government tracking devices on their boats to adhere to federal regulations. Locals call them black boxes.
Working my booth, I heard versions of the same story: A black box arrived in the mail. If the lobsterman failed to install it promptly — or if its signal cut out — their phone rang. The caller asked why their location was unavailable and whether the device was plugged in.
The government-imposed tracking mandate went into effect in 2023, requiring federally permitted vessels fishing for American lobster to transmit their location once every minute while the boat is at sea. About 1,200 Maine lobstermen hold federal permits, roughly a quarter of the state’s licensed harvesters.
Since then, officials have offered several justifications: better harvest data, whale conservation, fishery management, offshore enforcement and even offshore energy planning. These are worthwhile goals, but pursuing conservation or energy development does not require tracking a lobsterman when he is not lobstering.
The lack of a specific rationale leaves locals feeling like the requirement is little more than overbearing monitoring and classic government overreach. Lobstermen described it to me it as “unnecessary” and an “overstep.”
For some Mainers, what the government designates a “federally permitted lobster vessel” can be the equivalent of a family car. A boat may be the only way for island residents to reach hospitals, stores and other services on the mainland. Others use their boats to shuttle friends and relatives along the coast. But the black box must stay turned on, continually broadcasting their location.
One lobsterman recounted the night his pregnant daughter went into labor. His family lives on an island without a hospital, so he rushed her by boat to the mainland. Because the vessel is federally permitted for lobster fishing, government employees were able to track their location throughout the trip.
Frank Thompson, a fifth-generation lobsterman from Vinalhaven, Maine, is fighting back in court. When he approached my table, several lobstermen gathered around him, eager to shake his hand. “Frankie T!” a man called out in a thick Maine accent. “Legend in these parts!”
Thompson challenged the tracking mandate in federal court in 2024. A district court sided with the government and dismissed his case. An appeals court upheld the decision in November 2025. But his legal fight continues. On Sept. 28, the Supreme Court will consider Thompson’s petition at its annual long conference.
The courts dismissed Thompson’s case based on an idea coming from a line of Supreme Court cases, which held that some “closely regulated industries” — like liquor and firearm sales — pose enough risk to the public that officials may conduct searches without a warrant.
But the government has failed to communicate to lobstermen with federal permits from Maine to Virginia why their profession qualifies them for an exception to their rights.
Many locals believe that officials are imposing this surveillance not because continuous tracking is necessary but because they can get away with it. It would seem the government is stretching the Fourth Amendment’s “closely regulated industry” exception far beyond its intended use.
The danger is not that every worker will receive a black box tomorrow. It is that millions of Americans work in occupations the government could deem “closely regulated.” If lobstering with a federal permit can justify continuous, warrantless location tracking, there is no assurance that the black boxes will remain confined to New England’s coast.
The Fourth Amendment expressly prohibits unreasonable government searches. And in 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that attaching a GPS device to someone’s vehicle is a “search.” That case involved a suspected criminal. Tracking him without a warrant was illegal.
The government is tracking Thompson and other lobstermen in ten East Coast states simply because they operate federally-permitted lobstering vessels.
Represented by my organization, the Pacific Legal Foundation, Thompson is asking constitutional questions that reach far beyond his profession. If he fails, workers across America could be at risk of losing their constitutional right to privacy.
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