Flock Safety Dragnet Lawsuit: 360 Million Fourth Amendment Violations in San Jose in 2024?!?!

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net) for crunching the math most city councils never bother to show you: when you multiply a few hundred ALPR cameras by nonstop scanning and a full year of retention, you don't get 'a helpful tool for solving crimes' — you get hundreds of millions of discrete recordings of where private citizens drove, parked, and lived their lives. That's the uncomfortable arithmetic at the heart of this lawsuit, and it's the same arithmetic that applies in every city running a Flock network, not just San Jose.

The specific claim that ICE has been pulling from these databases is what should really get people's attention. Flock has repeatedly told the public and local officials that its system is for local law enforcement use, with access controls to prevent federal immigration sweeps. If that firewall is as porous as this video suggests, it means a 'public safety camera' approved by a city council for traffic enforcement is quietly feeding a federal deportation dragnet — with zero public debate about that specific use and zero meaningful Fourth Amendment review, because courts have been slow to treat mass ALPR logging as a 'search' at all.

Whatever happens in San Jose's courtroom, the broader lesson holds everywhere: the question isn't whether your city's cameras catch stolen cars, it's who else gets to query the haystack your plate is sitting in. Check our camera map to see what's logging your plates near you, and hit take action for concrete steps to push back at your next city council meeting.