For years now, cameras have quietly appeared on streets all across the country, tracking your movements as you go about your life. Known as automated license plate readers (ALPRs), these cameras scan every car that passes them. An amendment to the 2026 highway bill may soon roll back this infringement of Fourth Amendment rights.
Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry introduced the amendment banning ALPRs from federally funded highways, with an exception for tolling purposes.
Unlike red light or speed cameras which record in instances of law breaking, ALPRs collect a complete record of every car that passes. They create a dragnet in which innocents and guilty are caught up alike, with over 97,000 known cameras currently in the U.S., each capturing as many as 2,000 license plates a minute. The interconnected cameras systems can trace an individual over long distances.
All this is done without warrant requirements or probable cause standards. The standard of “innocent until proven guilty” is turned on its head.
In this way, movements of an entire population are recorded in real time and kept indefinitely. As ordinary people realize that their every move is monitored, they begin to modify their behavior and to self-censor, creating a problem for the First Amendment as well as for the Fourth.
Regrettably, their concerns are well-founded. Choices of how one chooses to spend one’s time are deeply revealing of one’s opinions, associations, and life choices. Anyone with access to an ALPR system knows who visits churches, mosques, gun ranges, abortion clinics, pro-life advocacy organizations, divorce lawyers, addiction treatment centers, or health care specialists. That information has already been used to track peaceful protestors. It has also been employed for racial profiling and predictive policing. Nor are there meaningful protections to protect this sensitive data from blackmailers or domestic abusers.
Especially alarming is the potential that all of this information could fall into the hands of a foreign adversary. With a single successful hack, China, Russia, or Iran could know the daily movements of hundreds of millions of Americans, going back years.
Not long ago, we had some degree of natural protections as manpower hours limited how much data could be analyzed in practice. Now software can quickly analyze hundreds of hours of data.
In addition to responding to these dangers, Rep. Perry’s amendment puts the decision where it belongs: in the legislative branches. Most ALPRs have been put up without input from elected officials. Often they are not even disclosed to the public. Some departments built fake cactus plants to hide the cameras.
By banning most ALPRs on federal highways, Rep. Perry’s amendment is vital for Americans’ basic freedoms.
Molly Powell is a Senior Regulations Policy Analyst at Americans for Prosperity.
