Criminals hate San Francisco’s surveillance camera network — a new lawsuit threatens to shut the cameras down

A retired San Francisco schoolteacher is accusing the city of running a “Big Brother” surveillance dragnet that illegally tracks everyday drivers, filing a federal class-action lawsuit Monday alleging sweeping Fourth Amendment violations.

Michael Moore, a retired public school teacher, says the city’s Flock license-plate reader system unlawfully monitors his movements as he drives to stores, his sons’ schools and family gatherings — all without a warrant or probable cause.

San Francisco has installed roughly 450 to nearly 500 Flock cameras along major roadways, making it “functionally impossible” to drive anywhere in the city without having your license plate photographed, logged, and stored in an AI-powered database, according to the complaint.

Flock operates a centralized nationwide database collecting more than 1 billion license-plate reads each month across over 5,000 communities, potentially allowing law enforcement agencies — including those outside San Francisco — to track residents’ movements.

The lawsuit, first reported by the San Francisco Standard, alleges the cameras create a detailed, long-term record of drivers’ movements, associations, and routines, all without a warrant. 

Any SFPD officer, the suit claims, can access the database after watching a short training video, with no requirement to show probable cause and little monitoring of how searches are used.

San Francisco police have already acknowledged that out-of-state agencies, including departments in Texas and Georgia, accessed the city’s license plate data, with some searches tied to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allegedly violating California law and the city’s own sanctuary policies.

Moore claims this sharing of data underscores the dangers of unchecked, warrantless monitoring.

Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, confirmed this is the first legal challenge to San Francisco’s surveillance cameras after lawsuits were filed against the cities of Oakland and San Jose.

“San Francisco has taken steps to ensure law enforcement agencies outside of California are not able to access SFPD’s Flock Automated License Plate Reader data,” Kwart said. “We take privacy very seriously and will review the complaint once we are served.”

Moore is asking a federal judge to shut the camera system down, order the deletion of collected data, and require a warrant before suing Flock cameras to collect images or information.