"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, a lawsuit filed this month has charged. The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) 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 license plate readers (ALPRs) without first getting a warrant."
""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 person's life as they 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 streets with nearly 500 ALPRs - collecting millions of records per month about people's movements - and keeps this data for an entire year. 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."
EFF and ACLU-NC filed a lawsuit in Santa Clara County Superior Court on behalf of SIREN and CAIR-CA challenging San Jose police practice of searching ALPR-collected location data without warrants. ALPRs are automated, high-speed cameras that capture license plates and create large databases of drivers' movements. San Jose operates nearly 500 ALPRs, collecting millions of records each month and retaining them for a year. Repeated captures can reveal travel patterns, commutes, visits to places of worship, medical providers, or protests, and out-of-state travel for healthcare. The department allows statewide law enforcement to query the database, enabling reconstruction of individuals' movements over time. The lawsuit contends these warrantless searches violate the California Constitution.
Read at San Jose Inside
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