This Would Finally Put Limits on License Plate Tracking
The short version: Institute for Justice attorneys argue a Supreme Court-adjacent case could finally force courts to treat mass location tracking, including ALPR networks, as a search requiring a warrant.
Our Take
The Institute for Justice has spent years chipping away at the legal fiction that dragnet surveillance isn't a "search" just because it happens in public. Their breakdown of United States v. Chatrie matters to anyone tracking Flock Safety's spread, because the same shaky Fourth Amendment logic that lets police vacuum up cell location data is the logic that lets ALPR cameras log every plate that passes, no warrant, no suspicion, no judge involved. If courts start drawing real lines around bulk location tracking, ALPR networks are squarely in the blast radius.
What IJ is pointing at isn't a magic fix, it's a crack in the wall. Mosaic theory arguments, the idea that enough small data points stitched together become a comprehensive picture of someone's life, are exactly how you'd challenge a city-wide grid of license plate cameras feeding a national database. That's the whole DeFlock thesis: no single camera is the problem, the network is.
Worth watching, worth crediting IJ for keeping this fight in public view instead of letting it rot in appellate footnotes. If you want to see how dense that network already is where you live, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the starting points.
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.