How Police Around the Country Are Conducting Mass Surveillance
The short version: Institute for Justice attorneys lay out how networked ALPRs create a de facto national tracking system and detail their Plate Privacy Project fighting back in court.
Our Take
When a public interest law firm starts building litigation infrastructure around license plate readers, it's a signal that this issue has moved well past the theoretical. IJ attorney Michael Soyfer and Dan King walk through what we've been saying for a while: these cameras don't just catch a plate once, they feed a searchable, retroactive map of everywhere you've driven into databases that cops across the country can query without a warrant. That's not targeted policing, that's a dragnet, and the Norfolk case they mention is exactly the kind of test case that could set precedent on whether this violates the Fourth Amendment.
What we appreciate about IJ's framing is that it treats this as a constitutional rights issue, not just a privacy inconvenience. The Plate Privacy Project gives people a concrete way to push back, whether that's through litigation, public records requests, or just raising hell at city council meetings when a Flock contract comes up for renewal. Legal challenges take years, but local organizing can kill a camera network in months if enough residents show up and ask hard questions about who's watching the watchers.
If you want to know whether this is already happening in your town, check our camera map to see documented ALPR locations near you, and if you're ready to do something about it, our take-action page has templates and strategies that have already gotten contracts cancelled elsewhere. Credit to IJ for putting real legal muscle behind this fight.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Institute for Justice, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.