"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment."*
Most of you know that I am strongly against speed cameras and automated license plate readers (ALPRs).
As a member of a persecuted minority, I am deeply worried about these systems tracking us—especially since Donald Trump has previously labeled trans rights activism as a national security threat.
You can't put the technological genie back in the bottle, but you can certainly chain it.
AP NewsBy BYRON TAUJune 9, 2026A coalition of civil rights groups on Tuesday asked a state judge to order one of New York’s largest suburban counties to stop its deployment of nearly 600 license plate readers, calling it a warrantless and “indiscriminate surveillance system” that violates the state constitution.The class action lawsuit also alleged that Westchester County never got proper authorization to launch the program, which has amassed a database of 1.6 billion plate scans that has been shared with more than 50 outside law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The complaint said the network “records the long-term travel patterns, daily habits, and intimate information of millions of law-abiding New Yorkers and other motorists who travel through Westchester.”“In a democracy, a police department cannot unilaterally decide — without legislative authorization — to surveil the daily movements of its own citizens without any real accountability, transparency, or oversight,” said Barry Friedman, founder and faculty director of the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, which brought the suit on behalf of four motorists. “This indiscriminate data surveillance must not be allowed to continue in the dark.”
"You had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and ... every movement scrutinized."*
We can pass laws that dictate who can see this data, how they can access it (demanding a subpoena, for instance), and how long companies are allowed to maintain it. But what happens when these companies simply ignore the law?
Electronic Freedom FoundationBy Rindala AlajajiMay 30, 2025In a chilling sign of how far law enforcement surveillance has encroached on personal liberties, 404 Media recently revealed that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. The officer searched 6,809 different camera networks maintained by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, including states where abortion access is protected by law, such as Washington and Illinois. The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.”
This is where we are heading! Toward... North Korea. Toward... China.
This case underscores our growing concern: that the mass surveillance infrastructure—originally sold as a tool to find stolen cars or missing persons—is now being used to target people seeking reproductive healthcare. This unchecked, warrant-less access that allows law enforcement to surveil across state lines blurs the line between “protection” and persecution.
"The choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness and ... for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better."*
But it goes even deeper than that. As Wired reported back in 2022, tech companies have been systematically ignoring state privacy laws, illegally handing over private license plate data to federal agencies like ICE and CBP.
Known as ALPRs, this surveillance tech is pervasive across the US—and could soon be used by police and anti-abortion groups alike.Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, America’s extensive surveillance state could soon be turned against those seeking abortions or providing abortion care.[...]However, anyone can become a first party by purchasing the company's cameras. (Its customers often include neighborhoods and home owners associations.) Flock Safety says its cameras are installed in more than 1,500 cities in 42 states, which are connected to Flock's centralized camera network. A March 2021 Vice investigation based on Flock-related emails obtained from nearly 20 police departments allows anyone who administers a Flock camera to “make the data Flock captures available to, say, the police, the home owner association's board, or the individual members of an entire neighborhood.” In addition to private customers, Flock has also reportedly partnered with hundreds of police departments across the US.
These corporations think they can play semantics and word games with our legal rights.
Look at what the State of Illinois recently uncovered:
August 25, 2025Flock Safety Shared Illinois Data with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Secretary Orders Flock to Shut off Data AccessSecretary of State Alexi Giannoulias’ office recently discovered that U.S. Customs and Border Protection gained access to Illinois license plate camera data – a violation of state law his office initiated.During a recent audit, Giannoulias’ office found that Flock Safety, which operates the largest automated license plate reader (ALPR) system in the nation, allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois license plate cameras on Illinois roads and surveil drivers. As a result, Giannoulias immediately ordered the company to shut off access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.“This sharing of license plate data of motorists who drive on Illinois roads is a clear violation of the state law. This law passed two years ago aimed to strengthen how data is shared and prevent this exact thing from happening,” Giannoulias said. “I take my responsibility as Secretary of State seriously. It’s why we spearheaded this legislation, which now gives us the tools needed to hold Flock accountable for its actions.”In June, the Secretary of State’s office announced it would conduct a sample audit of Flock Safety data sharing with local law enforcement. As a result of the sample audit that included a sampling of 12 local law enforcement agencies, the office discovered late last week that Flock did not have proper safeguards in place for data sharing, which was compounded by the fact that the company was running a pilot program with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which Flock leadership was unaware of. This was uncovered as part of the Secretary of State’s audit, and Flock has also since paused its pilot with CBP and other federal agencies, not only in Illinois but nationwide.
Consider these two terrifying scenarios:
Scenario #1: A woman of childbearing age travels north to visit her sister who is giving birth in a hospital. A nosy neighbor reports her to a state abortion tip line. Using an interconnected, nationwide camera network, hostile state authorities track her vehicle directly to an out-of-state hospital.
Scenario #2: The family of a transgender child travels north to visit relatives in a state like Connecticut, where gender-affirming care is legally protected. Texas authorities get a tip, abuse the ALPR database to track their vehicle all the way to New England, and launch an aggressive child welfare investigation into the parents the moment they return.
This is only the beginning. Federal agencies like ICE and CBP are now deeply reliant on this commercial data to track political dissidents and build psychological profiles on activists.
In fact, this dark playbook was rolled out years ago during the first Trump administration.
Secret database listed 59 advocates and journalists tied to the migrant caravan, according to leaked documentsThe GuardianAmanda Holpuch and Lauren ArataniWed 20 Mar 2019Photojournalist Ariana Drehsler was stopped for a secondary screening three separate times in one week while crossing the US-Mexico border to cover the migrant caravan in Tijuana this winter – unaware that the journey she had taken countless times before was suddenly more complicated because her name was logged in a secret government database.[...]Drehsler was grouped in the database as “media/journalist”, alongside others identified as “instigator” and “organizer”. Her image in the database, like those of several others, is marked with a bright green X on her face to indicate an alert has been placed on her passport. NBC 7 reported that the database included a dossier on each person.Civil rights activists and members of Congress have expressed alarm about this database, as well as the arrest of more than 37 other immigration activists by Donald Trump’s administration. They see it as a politically motivated crackdown on media and campaigners as Trump seeks to ramp up the pressure to build a border wall.“I have not seen this kind of systematic targeting of journalists and advocates in this way,” said the ACLU staff attorney Esha Bhandari. “I think it is very troubling, very disturbing.”
This is the exact behavior of fascists and dictators. This is not supposed to happen here in the United States.
As I said at the beginning, we cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. We have passed laws limiting data retention, restricting access, and requiring warrants. But if these private surveillance corporations refuse to obey the law, then we need to put real teeth into our legislation.
If tech companies choose to bypass our constitutional rights for profit and political alignment, maybe it's time to start throwing some of these corporate big-wigs into jail.
"The object of power is power."*
*George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
On a related topic facial recognition...
Lawsuit: “Police let an error-prone AI system stand in for an investigation.”ARS TechnicaJon BrodkinJun 10, 2026A man suing Florida police alleges that cops relied on a faulty facial recognition match and concealed exculpatory evidence when they arrested him on a charge of attempting to lure a child in August 2024. The plaintiff, Robert Dillon, was arrested after a facial recognition system flagged him as a 93 percent match to a suspect filmed by a McDonald’s surveillance camera.“This case is about what happens when police let an error-prone artificial intelligence system stand in for an investigation,” said the lawsuit filed today. “A facial recognition algorithm flagged Robert Dillon as the man who tried to lure or entice a child under twelve years old at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s. It was wrong. Mr. Dillon, a fifty-two-year-old resident of Fort Myers, had never set foot in Jacksonville Beach. But rather than test the machine’s answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it. Mr. Dillon was arrested and prosecuted for one of the most stigmatizing crimes a person can face.”The lawsuit said that “Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife” and “accused of attempting to lure a child—a charge carrying devastating social stigma and permanent reputational destruction. He was held overnight in jail, forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond, subjected to months of criminal prosecution, and publicly branded with a mugshot that remains accessible online, long after the charges were dropped.”The arrest was carried out by the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and recorded by a deputy’s body camera. Dillon’s wife told the deputy that her husband had never been to Jacksonville Beach, and Dillon told the deputy that he hadn’t left Fort Myers in two years, the lawsuit said.
And it is only going to get worst!
