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.
ALPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled cameras that automatically capture images of the license plates of every driver that passes by. The cameras, the ACLU suit alleges, represent “invasive mass-surveillance technology…without any suspicion that the driver has broken the law.”…