As Federal Court Rules ALPRs are Mass Surveillance, EFF Gets Disappointing Ruling

In an extremely disappointing ruling, a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN and CAIR California, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case. Make no mistake: we believe this ruling is wrong on the law, and we will appeal. The ruling ignores the importance of landmark rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the invasiveness of aggregating collected data on an individual over time, including one issued just months ago. It also severely underestimates the harm that ALPRs cause, in San Jose and around the country.  San Jose’s ALPR surveillance system is inescapable. It blankets the city’s streets in nearly five hundred cameras that continuously photograph every car that passes by and retains the collected data for a month or longer. In our briefs, we argued that law enforcement officers who warrantlessly search the resulting ALPR database are violating the California Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and its guarantee of privacy. The court disagr...