Do You Have Any Privacy from Surveillance on Public Roads?

Our Take

The Institute for Justice has built a reputation for taking the Fourth Amendment seriously when government tech quietly erodes it, and this conversation on United States v. Chatrie is worth your time. The case centers on geofence warrants, but the underlying question — do you forfeit privacy simply by existing in public — is the same one driving the fight over Flock Safety's ALPR network. Courts have long treated "public" as a magic word that erases Fourth Amendment protection, even as technology now lets police and private companies build a permanent, searchable record of where everyone goes.

That's exactly the gap ALPRs exploit. A single camera snapping your plate isn't surveillance in the old sense, but thousands of cameras networked together, logging every pass, building months of location history without a warrant, is something new entirely — a mosaic the Supreme Court has wrestled with before in cases like Carpenter. IJ's attorneys are right to push courts to stop pretending old doctrine cleanly answers questions about always-on tracking infrastructure. If the Fourth Amendment means anything, it has to account for the difference between a cop seeing you drive by and a corporation renting police departments a nationwide dragnet.

Litigation like this is one front in a bigger fight. The other is knowing where these cameras already sit in your own community and pushing back locally. Check our camera map to see what's tracking you, and visit our take-action page if you want to do something about it.