Privacy Advocate Sues CoCo Sheriff's Deputies After License Plate Readers Target His Car Stolen

Brian Hofer has worked for the last half decade on defending citizens’ rights to privacy and creating tighter oversight surrounding the use of mass surveillance techniques and technology.

So the irony is not lost on him when he said he and his brother, a 23-year-old political science student at UC Berkeley, were detained, sometimes at gunpoint, on Nov. 25 when a license plate reader near the San Pablo Lytton Casino off Interstate Highway 80 alerted police that they were riding in a stolen car.

“They picked the wrong guy,” Hofer said. “I’m seeing guns pointed at us. It was like a movie. It was executioner style. I was just totally confused about what was going on. They were obviously getting an alert that we were bad guys.”

Read/watch the full article at KTVU.