Tony Tan, Scott West, and Colin Wolfson are ordinary San Jose residents. Like other people, they drive to work, to see their friends and loved ones, and more. None of them have ever been arrested or, as far as they know, even suspected of a crime. Yet, every day, their movements (along with those of every other San Jose driver) are tracked and logged. Any officer with access can easily pull up a record of where they’ve been over the past 30 days.  

That’s because San Jose has built out a vast network of nearly 500 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras across the city. These are not standard surveillance cameras. Every time a car passes, they snap and upload a picture, where artificial intelligence reads the license plate and identifies other key vehicle features, like the make, color, and even bumper stickers.  

All of that information goes into a database for 30 days, where it’s accessible to thousands of government employees across California. Anyone with access can travel back in time and map drivers’ movements, spot patterns, and even identify a person’s associates. In the last half of 2025, San Jose’s massive database got searched an average of 15,000 times per day. All without probable cause or a warrant.  

Making matters worse, the database is ripe for abuse. Police across the country have been caught using similar ALPRs to stalk people, wrongly accuse people of crimes, and pull people over for no reason other than driving a route police deem “suspicious.” 

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow this type of mass surveillance state. If San Jose wants to track suspicious people, it should do what police have always done: get a warrant. It cannot just track the entire driving population on the off chance that information might prove useful later. That creates too much potential for abuse. Across the country, there have been reports of officers using these databases to help immigration enforcement agents, surveil protestors, and even stalk their ex-partners. 

The Fourth Amendment is a bulwark against overzealous law enforcement, not an inconvenience police can engineer around. Tony, Scott, and Colin, with help from the Institute for Justice, are bringing a federal, class action lawsuit to reinforce that message. 

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Tony, Scott, and Colin are law-abiding people who shouldn’t have to live their lives under pervasive government surveillance. 

Tony Tan is a software engineer specializing in privacy. He grew up in China, Japan, and the United States.  Tony is acutely aware of the concerns that arise from mass surveillance. Through his background in privacy, Tony understands the importance of minimizing the amount of data collected and held by systems like San Jose’s ALPR system. Tony appreciates the diverse and politically-active community in San Jose. He’s attended protests and volunteered to document U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity around San Jose. Tony passes one of San Jose’s ALPRs almost the moment he leaves his home. Especially given his political activism and the minimal restrictions on access to the data, Tony worries about how all the information these ALPRs collect about him could be misused.  

Scott West grew up in Southern California, where his father was a longtime sheriff’s deputy. Scott drives around San Jose for the same reasons most people do—to meet friends, run errands, and go to doctor’s appointments, among other things. When he started noticing San Jose’s ALPRs popping up along his routes, he decided to look into them. What he found disturbed him. Although Scott respects law enforcement, he finds it unsettling that the city is collecting a record of his movements and making it widely accessible to people he’s never met, even though he’s never been suspected of a crime. 

Colin Wolfson was born and raised in San Jose. Virtually every day, he passes the city’s ALPRs on his commute to work, grocery store trips, and meet-ups with friends, among other things. Like Tony and Scott, Colin finds all this surveillance disturbing. He understands that people might be able to see him out and about, but he never expected that the police would store records of his movements in a centralized database. 

The San Jose Police Department has blanketed the city in surveillance. 

In 2022, the San Jose Police Department ran an ALPR pilot program with the mass surveillance company Flock Safety. Flock Safety’s ALPRs photograph every passing car, even at high speeds and at night. They then use artificial intelligence to read the license plate and convert other car features into easily searchable data, including the make, color, and even bumper stickers. Those images and information all get uploaded into a database that officials can search at will. And Flock’s software even lets those officials map out every place a car has been seen, identify cars that are repeatedly seen together, and even determine a car’s likely future route. Across the country, Flock reportedly has more than 90,000 ALPRs that collect more than 20 billion datapoints every month. Its founder and CEO has said he envisions a future with a camera on every street corner. 

San Jose is coming close to that. Since the initial 2022 pilot, the number of ALPRs in San Jose has swelled to 474. These cameras, which span the city, are monitoring blocks with immigration lawyers’ offices, places of worship, and healthcare facilities. And they collect astonishing amounts of information. In 2024, the city reported that its ALPRs captured more than 360 million photographs. Only a tiny fraction were relevant to criminal investigations; instead, the vast majority reflect the movements of ordinary people going about their daily routines.  

Initially, the city hung onto all of the data for an entire year. In an effort to quiet critics, however, the police department reduced that to 30 days, which is just Flock’s default retention period. But 30 days is still a long amount of time, and according to the city’s own transparency portal, the database has been searched more than 4,000 times in the last 30 days.  

Thousands of government employees across California have free access to this massive trove of data. That includes more than 1,000 San Jose Police Department employees, as well as employees of nearly 300 other government entities in California. And the people with access to San Jose’s database search it with abandon. According to San Jose’s audit records, its Flock database was searched nearly 2.5 million times in the last half of 2025, for an average of more than 15,000 searches per day. None of these searches required a warrant, probable cause, or even the prior approval of a supervisor.  

Nationwide, abuse of these systems is unfortunately all too common. Officers have repeatedly been caught using ALPRs to stalk people. There have been reports of officers using them to retaliate against critics and even track down a woman in Texas who allegedly had a self-administered abortion. And as cities have weathered heavy-handed immigration enforcement, federal agencies have repeatedly accessed Flock’s customers’ data, including through undisclosed “pilot programs” Flock was running. Federal agents have also persuaded local police officers to run searches for them and even to share passwords. That’s how federal law enforcement was repeatedly able to access San Jose’s massive ALPR database. 

Persistent warrantless surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment. 

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the “right of the people to be secure in their persons.” At the founding, British officers had near-total discretion to invade people’s property and rifle through their homes and papers without having to go to a judge and prove probable cause for a warrant. That discretion left everyone vulnerable. In the framer’s words, it undermined “the right of the people to be secure.”  

As technology has advanced, the Supreme Court has tried to maintain the Fourth Amendment’s role in a rapidly digitizing world. Founding-era British officers rummaged through people’s physical papers to learn their secrets, but today officers can wiretap, access cloud files, or track cellphones. Giving officers unchecked power to rummage around in the digital world today threatens to spawn the widespread sense of insecurity eighteenth-century Americans had knowing officers could barge in at any moment.  

That’s why Fourth Amendment law has tried to place obstacles in the way of too-permeating police surveillance. The Supreme Court has held that police need a warrant to track someone with GPS or to get their historical location records from a cellphone service provider. It did so because allowing the government to mine a person’s public movements can reveal intimate insights about that person’s habits, religious observance, health, and friendships. Those insights go way beyond what any one person could learn just by seeing you out in public. And that’s why courts have ruled that police need a specific warrant based on probable cause if they want to track people electronically.  

San Jose’s surveillance scheme turns that upside down. Instead of tracking specific people it has reason to suspect of wrongdoing, it’s tracking everyone all the time. That forces San Jose’s residents to live with the same insecurity that eighteenth-century Americans felt. At any time, any one of thousands of government employees could mine their location data to stalk them or to try to pin a crime on them in retaliation for political speech. No judge will stand in the way. 

This case is an effort to restore that security, not just for Tony, Scott, and Colin, but for all San Jose residents. If the police department wants to track someone, it should do what the Fourth Amendment dictates: go to a neutral judge, prove probable cause, and get a warrant that specifically delineates the scope of the search. 

Case details—the parties, legal claim, court, and litigation team. 

The plaintiffs are Tony Tan, Scott West, and Colin Wolfson. They have sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Their legal claim is that San Jose’s warrantless ALPR surveillance violates their Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons . . . against unreasonable searches.” They seek to represent a class of similarly situated drivers. 

San Jose’s cameras violate the Fourth Amendment for two reasons. First, they violate the reasonable expectation of privacy against long-term tracking of people’s movements that the Supreme Court has recognized in cases involving GPS and cellphone surveillance. Second, this type of indiscriminate warrantless surveillance is an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment’s original meaning. 

The plaintiffs are asking for an order requiring San Jose to delete any photographs and data their ALPR system captures within 24 hours, unless police have a warrant or a recognized exception to the warrant requirement applies. They are also asking the court to declare that San Jose’s operation of its ALPR cameras is unlawful and to award them $1 in nominal damages. They are not seeking any other damages. 

The plaintiffs are represented by IJ Senior Attorney Robert Frommer and IJ Attorneys Michael Soyfer and Daniel Woislaw. 

About the Institute for Justice 

The Institute for Justice (IJ), founded in 1991, is the national law firm for liberty. This case is part of IJ’s Project on the Fourth Amendment, which seeks to bolster the right of all Americans to be secure in their persons and property. IJ has also launched the Plate Privacy Project, which combats unlawful ALPR surveillance through coordinated litigation, legislation, and activism. IJ is currently litigating several other challenges to warrantless searches, including a challenge to Norfolk, Virginia’s use of Flock ALPRs, a challenge to a New Jersey program forcibly collecting and retaining newborn blood, and challenges to warrantless entries of private land in Virginia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania (state and federal).