Challenging The Plate-Reader Panopticon From Coast To Coast

Automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are fast becoming the most common form of police surveillance Americans encounter in their daily lives. 

These high-tech devices capture images of passing cars and use AI to convert them into easily searchable data. The data then get stored in massive databases, often shared among hundreds or thousands of law enforcement agencies. The leading ALPR manufacturer boasts that its national network now averages over 20 billion license plate reads per month—that’s more than 83 datapoints per licensed driver per month, on average. All this happens without a warrant, probable cause, or any reason to believe that the vast majority of people caught in this dragnet have done anything wrong.

IJ believes people should not have to live in a fishbowl where the government monitors and records their movements to potentially use against them later. The U.S. Supreme Court has explained that a key purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to guard against that type of permeating government surveillance. IJ’s goal is to reinforce those protections. That’s why we are litigating two cases challenging unrestrained license plate reader surveillance. 

In Norfolk, Virginia, the police department blanketed the city with ALPRs. According to the police chief, that made it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” 

Unfortunately, though the court denied a motion to dismiss our case at the outset, it granted summary judgment in Norfolk’s favor after discovery had ended. Focusing solely on the number of cameras and datapoints they collected about IJ’s clients, the court held that the surveillance did not come close enough to capturing the “whole” of people’s movements. But that myopic focus on quantity ignores binding case law that requires courts to measure surveillance against traditional expectations of privacy dating back to the Founding. That means we have strong arguments to pursue on appeal. 

And there is one silver lining: The court acknowledged that an even more extensive surveillance system could run afoul of the Fourth Amendment.

That led to our latest challenge to ALPR surveillance in San Jose, California. The city operates a vast network of nearly 500 ALPRs. Many of these cameras surround blocks with sensitive locations, like hospice care facilities, religious organizations, and immigration lawyers’ offices. These are not standard traffic cameras. Every time a car passes, they snap and upload a picture. Then AI reads the license plate and identifies other key vehicle features, like the make, color, and even bumper stickers.

Watch the case video!

Our three clients are ordinary San Jose residents who find this level of surveillance creepy and overbearing. One of them, Tony Tan, encounters a camera within seconds of leaving his home and must pass others throughout the city to get just about anywhere. Together with Scott West and Colin Wolfson, Tony is part of an IJ class action challenging the city’s use of ALPR cameras. In fact, Tony left China to build a life in America in part because of China’s sweeping use of surveillance to monitor its citizens. He doesn’t want to see this country turn into the type of place he fled.

Police can—and do—get warrants to keep tabs on people legitimately suspected of crimes. But the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow cities to create a dragnet to spy on innocent people without proper checks and balances. That’s the message we hope to send in Norfolk and San Jose as we defend the Fourth Amendment right to be secure against the rapid encroachment of surveillance technology.

Michael Soyfer is an IJ attorney.