Here's a question that shouldn't be controversial: Should the government be able to track where you drive, when you drive, and who you drive with — all without a warrant?

If you answered "absolutely not," congratulations, you've read the Fourth Amendment. But San Jose apparently missed that day in civics class, because the city has deployed nearly 500 Flock surveillance cameras that do exactly that — vacuuming up license plate data on drivers across the city with zero judicial oversight.

Now drivers are suing, and honestly, it's about time.

Flock Safety, the company behind the cameras, markets them as a crime-fighting tool. And look — nobody is arguing that catching criminals is a bad thing. Public safety matters. But there's a massive difference between using targeted surveillance with proper warrants and building a sprawling dragnet that logs the movements of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people every single day. The first is policing. The second is something else entirely.

The lawsuit challenges what is essentially a mass warrantless surveillance program operating in plain sight. Every car that passes a Flock camera gets its plate scanned, timestamped, and stored. Over time, that data paints an incredibly detailed picture of your life — where you worship, who your doctor is, whether you attended a protest, who you're dating. That's not a minor privacy concern. That's an authoritarian's dream database.

As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly: "Flock are just the ones you can see and know who owns them. There are others, harder to spot and privately owned." Which raises an even more unsettling point — this is just the layer of surveillance we know about.

San Francisco residents should be paying close attention. What happens in San Jose has a way of migrating north. Cities across the Bay Area are weighing similar technology, and without strong legal pushback, the default trajectory is always more cameras, more data collection, more government access to your daily movements.

The lawsuit is the right move. If law enforcement wants to track someone, they should do what the Constitution requires: get a warrant. It's not that complicated. The fact that technology makes mass surveillance easy doesn't make it legal — and it certainly doesn't make it right.