Sweet home Alabama is under surveillance.
Without warrant, probable cause, consent, or restriction, state officials claim the right to enter private land, secretly monitor citizens, and collect data. However, two Alabama landowners, backed by Institute for Justice, have filed suit after repeated intrusions by game wardens.
“This is as fundamental as you can get,” Dale Liles says. “The government repeatedly has entered and monitored my private land with no warrant or warning. I want answers and I want it to stop. The public needs to know what is happening.”
“In my own back yard area, the state is watching my family,” Dalton Boley echoes. “They’re sneaking around with no accountability to anyone, trampling on basic rights.”
Americans, including Liles and Boley, are subject to total surveillance on private land according to state and federal officials, but legal challenges are mounting in multiple states.
“I’m willing to stand up and fight because somebody has to do something,” Boley adds. “This is not about rogue game wardens. This is about the state and government actively violating our core freedoms in the worst way.”
Jaw-Dropping Power
At 57, across a lifetime as an avid outdoorsman, Dale Liles has never had a hunting or fishing violation. A resident of Muscle Shoals, in northwest Alabama, Liles owns an 86-acre wetland in Colbert County, and he serves as director of the Colbert-Lawrence Ducks Unlimited chapter.
His gated and posted property—prime duck hunting ground—is composed of central buckbrush rimmed by hardwoods. In 2018, while checking game cameras, Liles spotted an Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (ADCNR) truck parked within his property line. The cab was empty.
“I hollered out and got no answer, but I kept waiting,” Liles recalls. “I was concerned seeing this game warden’s vehicle, thinking something must be wrong. I went on looking around for whoever was on my land, and about 30 minutes later, I was pulling back around and saw a game warden drive away really fast.”
“I caught up several miles down the way on a farm, and we talked cordially. I asked if there was an issue about him being on my land. He said, ‘No. I was just checking another guy’s property.’ I knew immediately that wasn’t true—because the other landowner was 3 miles to the west. Impossible. He was up to something on my land and wouldn’t say what.”
In 2024, while working on his land, Liles received a game camera photo texted by a neighbor—showing an ADCNR truck parked on Liles’ land. Once again, Liles saw the ADCNR truck drive away: “Like the time before, he took off at a high rate of speed and it was obvious he didn’t want me to catch him.”
(ADCNR did not respond to interview requests on all litigation regarding Liles and Boley.)
In January 2025, Liles’ personal game cameras picked up the same game warden. “I could see that after he spotted the camera, he turned it around to prevent getting photographed even more. Again, I don’t know what he was up to.”
Why did ADCNR game wardens repeatedly enter Liles’ private property? What did they observe or obtain?
Liles is uncertain. “How in the hell can this be? No warrant and no notice? Considering I’ve caught him multiple times, then that means he or others likely have been here many other times, too.”
“I don’t bootleg and I don’t hunt illegally. Why are you here? It’s unsettling and its dangerous. Why not come talk to me? Why not get a warrant? I’m a big supporter of law enforcement and I’ve got friends who are police officers and I’ve got friends from my entire life that were great game wardens. But in doing this, the state believes it can hide and watch you in your most private moments of any kind. That’s shady and everyone knows it.”
Have ADCNR officers placed surveillance cameras on Liles’ land? “Maybe they have,” he acknowledges. “Maybe they have them on there right now. Maybe they’ll never admit it. I’ve done nothing wrong and it’s a terrible violation for the government to sneak around on someone’s land. I promise you this: They’re surveilling me for a reason and I want answers. I also want to know how we got to the point where the state believes it can do anything it wants without any limit on private land.”
In 2025, represented pro bono by Institute for Justice (IJ), Liles sued ADCNR and challenged Alabama Code 9-2-65(a)(6), which notes, “game and fish wardens shall have power …to enter upon any land or water in the performance of their duty.”
“It’s jaw-dropping power over private land,” says IJ attorney Suranjan Sen. “The state asserts the power to unilaterally do anything in ‘performance of their duty’ and that can mean jump fences, ignore posted signs, and surveil citizens with no approvals needed whatsoever, and they can do it all without any limitation on time.”
However, the state’s assertion of authority over private property boundaries is in direct conflict with the Alabama State Constitution, Article 1, Section 5, that forbids warrantless searches of possessions—including private land, Sen contends.
“The state’s actions on private land are unconstitutional, period. There’s no judge involved to hold anyone accountable. There are no boundaries of any kind for the state, and therefore, this is the evisceration of private property. In other words, they believe they can surveil you and there’s nothing you can do about it: You’ll be spied on and you’ll like it.”
Picking the Lock
In 2021, 12 years after seeing combat in Afghanistan, Dalton Boley bought a home in northwest Alabama’s Lauderdale County. His neighbor, Regina Williams, granted Boley and three young sons recreational license on a stretch of ground beside her house—10 heavily wooded acres ringed by multiple residences and a subdivision.
Boley cut lanes, built a campsite, and set up trail cameras. “It hadn’t been used in decades and was overgrown, but we cleaned it up and it became a place for my boys to learn about the woods and the outdoors,” he says.
In February 2024, Boley checked one of his cameras and noted repeated images blurred or darkened. He assumed a squirrel or bird had impeded the camera view. However, upon examining an adjacent camera, he found a clear picture of an ADCNR officer on foot.
“I could see a game warden and the time stamp matched the blurs on the other camera. He had walked through and turned the camera away so he couldn’t be seen, but didn’t realize the other camera picked him up.”
“I had nothing to hide,” says 37-year-old Boley, who has never had a hunting citation in his life. “I didn’t know what he wanted, but I left it alone.”
Months later, in November, two game wardens knocked on Williams’ door and asked who used the 10 acres on her property. They proceeded to Boley’s driveway and front door area. Boley recognized one of the wardens from the captured camera picture.
“I told him I had a picture of him sneaking around on private, posted land, and I told him I knew he’d turned my camera around,” Boley says. “He admitted that he’d been in there on multiple occasions.”
The ADCNR wardens accused Boley of baiting deer in a chronic wasting disease (CWD) zone.
“That’s false,” Boley insists. “My boys and I are not bothering anyone. There are no guns being fired. There’s no secret distillery.”
The ADCNR allegations, Boley says, are odd. “According to what they told me, they’ve
been coming back in here over and over, snooping on 10 acres surrounded by houses, to accuse me of baiting deer? That story doesn’t pass the smell test.”
The state’s surveillance of Boley was conducted without cause, IJ attorney Sen insists. “No search warrant. No permission. No arrest. No citation. Dalton was not even hunting, yet they’ve gone around purportedly looking for CWD infractions, just because they believe they have the power to do so?”
“Dalton is a combat vet—a guy with diagnosed PTSD—who served his country, but now is being watched by armed officials of his own state, and on acres in the middle of a subdivision,” Sen continues. “This is a fundamental constitutional violation.”
Boley suspects the surface reason for ADCNR’s intrusion is camera-related. “Right before all of this started, I had big gaps of no image activity on several of my cameras, despite being in spots with constant triggering. Looking back, I wonder if that data was tampered with. Then again, when the wardens talked to me, one referenced seeing my son with a bag of seed on the property. How could he make such a comment unless he’s either seen my camera, hung his own camera, or been watching from a hidden location?”
Whether ADCNR wardens placed trail cameras on Boley’s licensed acreage or Liles’ acreage is yet to be determined. However, in 2020, Tennessee wardens set up secret cameras on private property without warrants, as detailed in a successful IJ lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s actions.
“The statute we are challenging in Alabama is essentially identical to the statute we successfully challenged in Tennessee, so it is entirely likely that DCNR has placed cameras on people’s property,” Sen notes. “And it’s almost certain that they’d say that they can do so if they want to.”
“The whole thing is unsettling,” Boley adds. “I’ve got state officials, who say they represent Alabama, creeping around my family and watching us. And I’m supposed to believe this is constitutional?”
Significantly, during their encounter with Boley, ADCNR game wardens, according to Sen, justified their entrance on private land by openly citing the national Open Fields doctrine.
Open Fields, among the federal government’s most sweeping powers, picks the lock on approximately 96% of private land in the United States—at least 1.2 billion acres.
Wrong as Hell
Prior to Alabama, since 2020, IJ-led lawsuits challenging Open Fields at the state level have successfully been litigated in Tennessee (game wardens in Tennessee must now obtain a warrant before entering privately marked land), and are ongoing in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Louisiana.
The Open Fields doctrine, stemming from two Supreme Court decisions in 1924 (Hester) and 1984 (Oliver), gives federal officials permission to enter and surveil private land with no limitation on frequency or duration, i.e., the government can access any ground without warrant or probable cause, excluding a personal residence and immediate yard. The two SCOTUS rulings, 60 years apart, asserted that on private land, the Bill of Rights’ Fourth Amendment protection from search and seizure does not exist.
Open Fields power is possessed by all federal officials from USDA, DOJ, FBI, Interior, Treasury, FWS, EPA, Bureau of Land Management, Corps of Engineers, and onward. In both legal cases (Hester and Oliver) when Open Fields was established, game wardens were not involved. Hester featured revenue officers; Oliver featured policemen.
“Don’t be fooled by thinking Open Fields only applies to owning thousands of acres,” Sen says. “It’s not about hunting or how much land you have. Open Fields is about your three acres or 10 acres or 100 acres, and right up to and including your back yard.”
(ADCNR did not respond to Farm Journal interview requests regarding the department’s Open Fields policy.)
Sen wants answers about the scope of state power in Alabama. “First, we want the statute changed so that officials can’t intrude on private land. Second, we want to know how much data and information the state of Alabama is collecting on its citizens without warrant or cause.”
“The government has violated Dalton and Dale’s expectations of privacy. And it says it that Dalton and Dale—and the rest of us, for that matter—shouldn’t have any such expectation.”
Boley and Liles remain adamant: private land should not be open-access to government at any level.
“People used to think these types of violations were the action of one rogue official,” Boley adds, “but they’re starting to realize this power ultimately comes from the state.”
“As an American, I still have a hard time believing this is supposed to be legal,” Liles concludes. “No. It’s wrong as hell.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
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