San Jose Drivers Sue Over 500 Flock ALPR Cameras Tracking Every Car — Fed Into ICE and FBI Without Warrants

Every Car in San Jose Is Being Tracked. You Were Not Asked.

San Jose deployed 500 Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras — one of the densest city-wide ALPR networks in the United States. The system captures, timestamps, and stores the location of every vehicle passing a camera. That data sits in a private Flock database queryable by ICE and the FBI without a warrant requirement.

The Receipt

The class-action filing, reported by NBC News in April 2026, names the City of San Jose, the San Jose Police Department, and Flock Safety as defendants. Plaintiffs include drivers whose location histories were captured without consent or notification. Flock's contract terms with law enforcement agencies — obtained in prior FOIA requests nationally — confirm federal agency data-sharing provisions with no judicial oversight requirement.

What It Proves

This is not theoretical surveillance. It is a documented, contractual data pipeline from city streets to federal immigration enforcement, operating without warrant, without consent, and without publicly disclosed policy. Five hundred cameras covering a mid-sized city means near-complete vehicle movement tracking. The lawsuit names it correctly: mass surveillance infrastructure deployed against the Fourth Amendment.