New lawsuit claims Flock cameras violate 4th amendment

Our Take

NBC10 Boston's report on the San Jose lawsuit is worth watching because it puts a legal spine behind what critics have said for years: blanket license plate surveillance isn't targeted policing, it's a permanent, warrantless log of where you drive. Three plaintiffs are arguing that scooping up every plate that passes a Flock camera, then storing and sharing that data, amounts to an unreasonable search — even if no single officer ever looks at your file. That's the crux of the constitutional fight nationwide right now.

Flock and the departments that buy its cameras have leaned on the old argument that you have no expectation of privacy on a public road. But courts are increasingly being asked to consider the difference between a cop seeing your car once and a network that builds a searchable timeline of everywhere you've been, indefinitely, without a warrant. That's not spotting a stolen car — that's mass tracking, and this case could help decide whether the Fourth Amendment still means anything in an era of automated policing.

Cases like this move slowly, but public pressure moves faster. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and visit take action if you want to push back on ALPR deployment in your own city before it needs a lawsuit to do it.