A class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco last week ignited a fierce debate over policing, privacy and the future of public space in the digital age. The complaint, brought by a retired schoolteacher against the City and County of San Francisco and its police department, portrays the city’s network of automated license plate reader cameras as an unconstitutional “surveillance dragnet” that threatens the basic freedom to move through the city without being tracked.
A Citywide Network Logging Every Drive
The system at the heart of the dispute is a citywide array of Flock Safety-brand automated license plate readers installed over the past year. These cameras, mounted on poles and street corners across San Francisco, take millions of high-speed photographs of passing vehicles’ plates, timestamps and locations.
That information is retained in a central database and can be queried by law enforcement officers without a warrant or even suspicion of wrongdoing. This comes after a widely publicized pushback by safety advocate after it came to light that Providence Police Department had used Flock license plate reader technology to track and ultimately locate the Utah University shooter recently.
In the legal filing, the plaintiff describes how his ordinary daily activities (dropping children off at school, picking up groceries, visiting neighbors0 are all logged into a government system that could, in effect, reconstruct the pattern of his life.
He calls this a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches, and argues that the perpetual recording of every driver’s movement amounts to an unjustified infringement on privacy…