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Written By Naomi Brockwell
You might have noticed cameras quietly going up all over your city or town. They blend in, mounted next to traffic lights or tucked onto poles by the roadside. They’re easy to miss. But they’re part of a growing network designed to track where everyone drives, at all times.
If you drive to a protest, that trip is logged.
Visit an opposition party meeting? That visit is in a searchable government database.
Go to a shooting range, a reproductive health clinic, a mosque, your lover’s home, your child’s school... every movement is documented.
Welcome to the world of automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs.
Written By Naomi Brockwell
You might have noticed cameras quietly going up all over your city or town. They blend in, mounted next to traffic lights or tucked onto poles by the roadside. They’re easy to miss. But they’re part of a growing network designed to track where everyone drives, at all times.
If you drive to a protest, that trip is logged.
Visit an opposition party meeting? That visit is in a searchable government database.
Go to a shooting range, a reproductive health clinic, a mosque, your lover’s home, your child’s school... every movement is documented.
Welcome to the world of automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs.
Automatic license plate readers were once a niche police tool. But today, thanks to companies like Flock Safety, they’ve spread into neighborhoods, HOAs, schools, and businesses across the country.
They’re not just cameras, they’re part of a cloud-based surveillance system. Every scan is uploaded to Flock’s servers. The footage (including the license plate, the time, the location, and even the make, model, and color of your vehicle) becomes part of a centralized, searchable database.
Police are one of Flock’s primary clients. When a department buys a Flock subscription, they’re not just getting access to cameras in their city. They’re getting access to a national database of vehicle movements.
Here’s how it works:
If a police department agrees to share its own Flock camera data, it can then search data from every other participant that has done the same.
The result is a real-time surveillance grid.
One that logs where millions of people drive.
Let’s talk about the Fourth Amendment. It was written to protect us from exactly this: blanket surveillance without a warrant.
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Fourth Amendment and its warrants requirements is a safeguard against unchecked power. The point is to protect you from government searches (whether that’s your location, your movements, or other personal information) unless there’s a specific reason, backed by probable cause, and approved by a judge.
If police want to track your phone for more than a moment, or access your location history, they need a warrant. The Supreme Court made that clear in Carpenter v. United States.
The court ruled that the government can’t access historical location data from your phone without a warrant, even if that data was collected by a third party.
They also ruled in U.S. v. Jones that tracking your car with a GPS device counts as a Fourth Amendment search.
Put those two decisions together, and the logic is clear:
If tracking your car in real time requires a warrant…
And accessing location data held by third parties requires a warrant…
Then using license plate readers to retroactively trace your movements without a warrant seems like a clear constitutional violation.
And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Police can search databases like those aggregated by Flock without any judicial oversight.
Even if the camera that captured your car was owned by an HOA, a school, or a private business, in many cases, the footage is fed into the same system law enforcement accesses, with no warrant required and no notification to the person being searched.
The government isn’t supposed to go back and retrace your movements using data it didn’t have a warrant for at the time. And the government is not legally allowed to retrace your steps with data that it collected up to usually a few days. Courts have ruled that this kind of retroactive surveillance violates your reasonable expectation of privacy.
So how is this current situation even allowed? It’s not clear that it is. But until we get a ruling, agencies are relying on some semantic acrobatics to justify it.
Well, here’s the loophole: the government isn’t building the dragnet.
Private companies are.
The government can’t track your location, but private companies can.
Flock can legally install cameras in neighborhoods, collect location data, and store it all in their own systems.
But they can’t install those cameras on light poles, traffic intersections, or public roads without government approval.
So what happens?
The government gives them permission.
In many cases, the city even pays for the cameras.
And in return, the government gets access to the data.
It’s a perfect circle:
The government can’t build a dragnet directly, because the Constitution forbids it.
Private companies can’t scale a dragnet without government infrastructure.
So they join forces, each side helping the other bypass the restrictions meant to protect our civil liberties.
Here’s how it typically works:
A city contracts with Flock or another ALPR vendor. They buy a certain number of cameras. The vendor installs them, usually on city infrastructure like streetlights or utility poles.
Some cities even mount them on garbage trucks or buses, so they sweep entire neighborhoods as they move.
The vendor maintains the cameras, and all footage is uploaded to the cloud.
And if you’re a police department that has opted in to share footage, then you in turn get access to all the footage from everyone who has also opted in.
If law enforcement were the ones actively setting up and operating these cameras, it would be much harder to argue this isn’t a government search, one that triggers a warrant requirement under the Constitution.
So what do they do instead? They argue:
“We’re not collecting this data — the vendor is. We’re just accessing publicly available information.”
But there’s nothing passive about that.
If you’re procuring the cameras, approving the locations, and contracting to receive the footage, you’re not a bystander -- you’re an active participant in the surveillance.
In fact one could argue you’re actually building the system.
There’s also something called the “mosaic theory” of privacy.
The mosaic theory says that while one tile might not show much, if you put enough tiles together you see the whole picture of someone’s life.
In terms of constitutionality, individual little bits of information can be legally gathered, but once you combine all those bits of information, now you have a full picture and then it becomes illegal.
For example, it might be legal to take a picture of someone’s car in public. But imagine a scenario where someone takes thousands of pictures of your car, and from these pictures is able to recreate your travel patterns.
At that point, it’s not just “observation.” It’s a search, and the Constitutional protections should kick into gear.
Supporters of automatic license plate readers often cherry pick their success stories. ALPRs are marketed as tools to stop crime and protect children.
But we can’t just look at the benefits of this technology. We must also weigh the costs.
The problem with mass surveillance infrastructure is what happens when the wrong people inherit this system:
Imagine the most dangerous person you can think of in power.
Now imagine they inherit the surveillance network you just said yes to.
We need to get back to warrant requirements.
We need real checks and balances.
Because a dragnet system that monitors hundreds of millions of innocent people is a huge danger to freedom.
Jen Barber from Jen’s Two Cents said it plainly:
“I now live in a community where I cannot get in or out of my neighborhood without a Flock camera watching me. I don’t need Big Brother building a lifetime record of my whereabouts. It’s none of their business.”
This isn’t just about your car.
It’s about whether privacy and freedom can exist outside your front door.
Freedom of movement isn’t really free if you can’t go anywhere without being tracked.
And I’m not quite ready to give up my freedom of movement yet.
Yours in privacy,
Naomi
Consider supporting our nonprofit so that we can fund more research into the surveillance baked into our everyday tech. We want to educate as many people as possible about what’s going on, and help write a better future. Visit LudlowInstitute.org/donate to set up a monthly, tax-deductible donation.
NBTV. Because Privacy Matters.
Automatic license plate readers were once a niche police tool. But today, thanks to companies like Flock Safety, they’ve spread into neighborhoods, HOAs, schools, and businesses across the country.
They’re not just cameras, they’re part of a cloud-based surveillance system. Every scan is uploaded to Flock’s servers. The footage (including the license plate, the time, the location, and even the make, model, and color of your vehicle) becomes part of a centralized, searchable database.
Police are one of Flock’s primary clients. When a department buys a Flock subscription, they’re not just getting access to cameras in their city. They’re getting access to a national database of vehicle movements.
Here’s how it works:
If a police department agrees to share its own Flock camera data, it can then search data from every other participant that has done the same.
The result is a real-time surveillance grid.
One that logs where millions of people drive.
Let’s talk about the Fourth Amendment. It was written to protect us from exactly this: blanket surveillance without a warrant.
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Fourth Amendment and its warrants requirements is a safeguard against unchecked power. The point is to protect you from government searches (whether that’s your location, your movements, or other personal information) unless there’s a specific reason, backed by probable cause, and approved by a judge.
If police want to track your phone for more than a moment, or access your location history, they need a warrant. The Supreme Court made that clear in Carpenter v. United States.
The court ruled that the government can’t access historical location data from your phone without a warrant, even if that data was collected by a third party.
They also ruled in U.S. v. Jones that tracking your car with a GPS device counts as a Fourth Amendment search.
Put those two decisions together, and the logic is clear:
If tracking your car in real time requires a warrant…
And accessing location data held by third parties requires a warrant…
Then using license plate readers to retroactively trace your movements without a warrant seems like a clear constitutional violation.
And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Police can search databases like those aggregated by Flock without any judicial oversight.
Even if the camera that captured your car was owned by an HOA, a school, or a private business, in many cases, the footage is fed into the same system law enforcement accesses, with no warrant required and no notification to the person being searched.
The government isn’t supposed to go back and retrace your movements using data it didn’t have a warrant for at the time. And the government is not legally allowed to retrace your steps with data that it collected up to usually a few days. Courts have ruled that this kind of retroactive surveillance violates your reasonable expectation of privacy.
So how is this current situation even allowed? It’s not clear that it is. But until we get a ruling, agencies are relying on some semantic acrobatics to justify it.
Well, here’s the loophole: the government isn’t building the dragnet.
Private companies are.
The government can’t track your location, but private companies can.
Flock can legally install cameras in neighborhoods, collect location data, and store it all in their own systems.
But they can’t install those cameras on light poles, traffic intersections, or public roads without government approval.
So what happens?
The government gives them permission.
In many cases, the city even pays for the cameras.
And in return, the government gets access to the data.
It’s a perfect circle:
The government can’t build a dragnet directly, because the Constitution forbids it.
Private companies can’t scale a dragnet without government infrastructure.
So they join forces, each side helping the other bypass the restrictions meant to protect our civil liberties.
Here’s how it typically works:
A city contracts with Flock or another ALPR vendor. They buy a certain number of cameras. The vendor installs them, usually on city infrastructure like streetlights or utility poles.
Some cities even mount them on garbage trucks or buses, so they sweep entire neighborhoods as they move.
The vendor maintains the cameras, and all footage is uploaded to the cloud.
And if you’re a police department that has opted in to share footage, then you in turn get access to all the footage from everyone who has also opted in.
If law enforcement were the ones actively setting up and operating these cameras, it would be much harder to argue this isn’t a government search, one that triggers a warrant requirement under the Constitution.
So what do they do instead? They argue:
“We’re not collecting this data — the vendor is. We’re just accessing publicly available information.”
But there’s nothing passive about that.
If you’re procuring the cameras, approving the locations, and contracting to receive the footage, you’re not a bystander -- you’re an active participant in the surveillance.
In fact one could argue you’re actually building the system.
There’s also something called the “mosaic theory” of privacy.
The mosaic theory says that while one tile might not show much, if you put enough tiles together you see the whole picture of someone’s life.
In terms of constitutionality, individual little bits of information can be legally gathered, but once you combine all those bits of information, now you have a full picture and then it becomes illegal.
For example, it might be legal to take a picture of someone’s car in public. But imagine a scenario where someone takes thousands of pictures of your car, and from these pictures is able to recreate your travel patterns.
At that point, it’s not just “observation.” It’s a search, and the Constitutional protections should kick into gear.
Supporters of automatic license plate readers often cherry pick their success stories. ALPRs are marketed as tools to stop crime and protect children.
But we can’t just look at the benefits of this technology. We must also weigh the costs.
The problem with mass surveillance infrastructure is what happens when the wrong people inherit this system:
Imagine the most dangerous person you can think of in power.
Now imagine they inherit the surveillance network you just said yes to.
We need to get back to warrant requirements.
We need real checks and balances.
Because a dragnet system that monitors hundreds of millions of innocent people is a huge danger to freedom.
Jen Barber from Jen’s Two Cents said it plainly:
“I now live in a community where I cannot get in or out of my neighborhood without a Flock camera watching me. I don’t need Big Brother building a lifetime record of my whereabouts. It’s none of their business.”
This isn’t just about your car.
It’s about whether privacy and freedom can exist outside your front door.
Freedom of movement isn’t really free if you can’t go anywhere without being tracked.
And I’m not quite ready to give up my freedom of movement yet.
Yours in privacy,
Naomi
Consider supporting our nonprofit so that we can fund more research into the surveillance baked into our everyday tech. We want to educate as many people as possible about what’s going on, and help write a better future. Visit LudlowInstitute.org/donate to set up a monthly, tax-deductible donation.
NBTV. Because Privacy Matters.
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