{"id":58947,"date":"2025-11-18T19:02:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T19:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/58947\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T19:02:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T19:02:07","slug":"eff-aclu-sue-san-jose-over-warrantless-access-to-license-plate-data-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/58947\/","title":{"rendered":"EFF, ACLU sue San Jose over warrantless access to license plate data"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN JOSE \u2014 A coalition of high-profile civil-liberties groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU are suing San Jose over what it characterizes as millions of warrantless searches of automated license plate reader<\/a> data, which it says has put the city in an unprecedented state of surveillance with no meaningful gatekeeping.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, claims that local authorities as well as outside law enforcement are violating the California Constitution by continuously combing, without a search warrant, the hundreds of millions of data points captured annually by the roughly 500 plate-reading cameras installed throughout the city.<\/p>\n

For the plaintiffs \u2014 who also include the immigrant-rights organization SIREN and the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American\u2013Islamic Relations \u2014 that amounts to virtually unchecked \u201cretrospective\u201d monitoring of people\u2019s movements in Northern California\u2019s largest city, and the litigation is aimed at reining it in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis practice violates the California Constitution\u2019s ban on unreasonable searches \u2026 so we\u2019re asking the court to declare that these warrantless searches are unconstitutional and order the defendants to stop this practice,\u201d EFF staff attorney Jennifer Pinsof told this news organization. \u201cThis would be an important limit on ALPRs because without a warrant, there is an unchecked police power to scrutinize the movements of San Jose\u2019s residents and visitors as they travel from home to work, drop off their children at school, or park at a house of worship, a doctor\u2019s office, or a protest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawsuit names as defendants the city of San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan and Police Chief Paul Joseph. This news organization was in the process of reaching out to those parties Tuesday.<\/p>\n

In San Jose, officials have spent the past two years touting the benefits of the plate readers, contracted through Flock Systems. Early pilot programs were introduced as a way to curb deadly vehicle-pedestrian collisions<\/a> at some of the city\u2019s busiest intersections. And as the city commissioned more, officials and the police department have credited the cameras as key contributors to arrests in high-level crimes including homicides and organized retail thefts<\/a>: The San Jose Police Department has prominently cited ALPR data<\/a> in at least a half-dozen news releases from the past year.<\/p>\n

The technology has drawn its share of critics, particularly in the civil-liberties sphere. Earlier this year, the watchdog group Oakland Privacy cited a database of ALPR access by Southern California police agencies showing that they were illegally sharing data with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But also, on the same day of the lawsuit filing, the Oakland chapter of the NAACP called for Oakland to bolster its commitment to ALPR cameras as a vital crime-fighting measure.<\/p>\n

Without a warrant requirement, SIREN Executive Director Huy Tran forewarns scenarios where authorities \u2014 especially given the external access \u2014 could freely track a person traveling to a reproductive clinic or an immigration law firm.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe right to privacy is one of the strongest protections that our immigrant communities have in the face of these acts of violence and terrorism from the federal government,\u201d Tran said in a statement. \u201cThis case does not raise the question of whether these cameras should be used. What we need to guard against is a surveillance state, particularly when we have seen other cities or counties violate laws that prohibit collaborating with ICE. We can protect the privacy rights of our residents with one simple rule: Access to the data should only happen once approved under a judicial warrant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tuesday\u2019s lawsuit draws on a search of a public-facing transparency portal hosted by Flock that offers aggregate figures on how often license plate data recorded in San Jose is searched by local police.<\/p>\n

The public data shows that in 2024, ALPR cameras in San Jose made more than 361 million plate scans, and that just over 923,000 of those scans corresponded with hits on vehicles that were being sought, or 0.2 percent. A recent slice of data, from this past October, found that 6.4% of 2.6 million scanned vehicles returned links to crimes or investigations.<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs make a point of distinguishing these instances from the vast majority of vehicles that are recorded but not the subject of any criminal suspicion. Even so, the public data posted by Flock \u2014 and summarized in the filing \u2014 shows how routine SJPD searches the database, largely for non-exigent reasons, which is a pillar of the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

In a one-year period ending this past June, SJPD conducted over 261,000 searches of the database, equating to 692 searches a day. But when accounting for other state law enforcement agencies that also have access, that search total jumps to nearly 4 million searches in the same period, or 10,864 a day.<\/p>\n

Pinsof said those figures are concerning in part because of San Jose\u2019s one-year retention period for ALPR data, which combined with officers\u2019 mostly unrestricted access to the database means that people who drive a car in San Jose can be extensively tracked without any clear limits.\u00a0The lawsuit adds that the only way to opt out of this data collection is not to drive at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike police officers, ALPR cameras engage in constant, around-the-clock surveillance and do not take breaks. A single camera can capture and store the locations of thousands of drivers in a matter of minutes,\u201d Pinsof said. \u201cThis sensitive data reveals people\u2019s travel patterns and provides an intimate window into a person\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The feasibility of officers securing a warrant every time they search past ALPR data remains to be seen, but it would almost certainly be cumbersome, and Pinsof said that friction is the point. She added that while the litigation filed Tuesday focuses on San Jose, she hopes that broader law enforcement takes notice.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, in the golden age of surveillance we\u2019re currently living in, this technology has moved faster than legal protections of our privacy,\u201d she said. \u201cNow we need to take back our privacy and other freedoms, by placing critical limits on how police use ALPR data.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JOSE \u2014 A coalition of high-profile civil-liberties groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[32905,35939,19898,468,35938,35937,35940,1846,18339,88,90,89,14311,9550],"class_list":["post-58947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-aclu","tag-alpr","tag-cair","tag-civil-liberties","tag-eff","tag-electronic-frontier-foundation","tag-flock","tag-lawsuit","tag-license-plate-reader","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-siren","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}