SAN JOSE, Calif. – San Jose and its police department routinely violate the California Constitution by conducting warrantless searches of the stored records of millions of drivers’ private habits, movements, and associations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) argue in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on behalf of the Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations – California (CAIR-CA), challenges San Jose police officers’ practice of searching for location information collected by automated licence plate readers (ALPRs) without first getting a warrant.
ALPRs are an invasive mass-surveillance technology: high-speed, computer-controlled cameras that automatically capture images of the license plates of every driver that passes by, without any suspicion that the driver has broken the law.
“A person who regularly drives through an area subject to ALPR surveillance can have their location information captured multiple times per day,” the lawsuit says. “This information can reveal travel patterns and provide an intimate window into a personS life as thay travel from home to work,drop off their children at school,or park at a house of worship,a doctor’s office,or a protest. It could also reveal whether a person crossed state lines to seek health care in California.”
The San Jose Police Department has blanketed the city’s roadways with nearly 500 ALPRs – indiscriminately collecting millions of records per month about people’s movements – and keeps this data for an entire year.then the department permits its officers and other law enforcement officials from across the state to search this ALPR database to instantly reconstruct people’s locations over time – without first getting a warrant. This is an unchecked police power to scrutinize the movements of law-abiding residents.
Contact: Josh Richman, EFF, jrichman@eff.org; Carmen King, ACLU of northern California, cking@aclunc.org
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