Court Dismisses Challenge Against Automatic License Plate Reader Surveillance

Case Overview

• A California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, a lawsuit challenging the city's warrantless searches of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU of Northern California, representing SIREN and CAIR California, announced plans to appeal the decision, arguing that the court failed to account for recent Supreme Court precedents regarding the invasiveness of aggregate data tracking.

The Dispute

• EFF's position: San Jose's system, consisting of nearly 500 cameras that track and map vehicle movements over time, violates the California Constitution's privacy protections.
• Court's reasoning: The court ruled that drivers lack a reasonable expectation of privacy on public roads, relying on a precedent regarding individual streetlight cameras, which EFF argues ignores the systemic, networked nature of ALPRs.

Divergent Legal Precedent

• A federal district court in Oklahoma recently issued a conflicting ruling, labeling ALPRs as "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."
• In that case, the court found that a police officer's warrantless search of a driver's ALPR history—which revealed 30 days of location data across three states—violated the Fourth Amendment.
• The Oklahoma court noted the distinction between fleeting observations by others and the non-consensual, long-term mapping of a person's life and relationships.

Implications and Advocacy

• EFF intends to continue challenging ALPR technology in court to secure rulings that better reflect modern privacy standards.
• Activists are increasingly pushing back against the adoption of ALPR technology at both local and state levels across the country.