It would be pretty creepy if a police officer followed your car 24 hours a day, tracking the daily movements that reveal where you go, what you do, and who you see. But Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) enable this kind of mass surveillance in cities across the country every day. These are camera networks that take pictures of every passing vehicle, putting the location information of millions of drivers into databases where police can instantly reconstruct their movements.
Worse yet, authorities have been allowed to perform these searches without a warrant. In the city of San Jose, for instance, police aren't required to have any suspicion of wrongdoing before searching ALPR databases. Now, two nonprofits, represented by EFF and the ACLU of Northern California, are suing to stop San Jose's warrantless ALPR surveillance.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of SIREN and CAIR California, challenges San Jose police officers’ practice of searching for location information collected by ALPRs without first getting a warrant. It asks the court to order San Jose and its police department to end this practice, which violates the California Constitution and undermines the privacy rights of every person who drives through the city.
As stated in the lawsuit, San Jose’s ALPR program is especially invasive. The city has blanketed its roadways with nearly 500 ALPRs – indiscriminately collecting millions of records per month about people’s movements – and keeps this data for an entire year. Over the course of just 30 days in October, records show officers conducted 5,040 retrospective searches. This is an unchecked police power to scrutinize the movements of San Jose’s residents and visitors as they lawfully travel to work, to the doctor, or to a protest.
The threat ALPR searches pose to privacy are not theoretical. Just last week, an EFF investigation uncovered more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies that conducted ALPR searches in connection with protest activity. As this report helps illustrate, ALPR networks may be marketed as safety systems, but they're designed to capture information on every vehicle that passes by their cameras. That means they don't just track "criminals" but everyone, all the time.
READ MORE…
