A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide

This would be terrible — as written, the bill would also ban red light and speeding cameras. These are some of our most effective tools for traffic law enforcement; for instance, speeding cameras in NYC resulted in a 94% (!!!) reduction in speeding where they're installed [1].

I want to see Flock banned as much as the next person, but we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-speed-camer...

If a single car manufacturer decides to capture license plate data from their customers ' cars' cameras, then we're back where we started.

If we accept that ALPR have a place in society, the data needs the same level of narrow scope and judicial process that other personal tracking data has. I don't care what the precedent is for regular cameras: AI-enabled facial/ALPR tracking is highly invasive action by the government and should be regulated as such.

You want to search a database? Go to a judge, give your probable cause, get approval. No exceptions and no automated aggregation of tracking across jurisdictions.

All those cameras you see on top of intersections? Yeah those - are going to be used for this instead of flock in a few years. They're letting flock take the public hit, it's all going to move.

I like this proposed policy and I'll happily take the win if it passes but I see two subtexts here and neither is good:

First is that local and state governments have been deploying 1984 for enforcement of petty matters for which dispensing "real" enforcement labor can't be justified economically politically a or both. The feds are fine with this because they can get at that data. What they're not fine with is that it's pissing people off. The feds are worried that this could turn into court and legislative precedents that make things harder for them. For example the DEA doesn't want their flagship I95 surveillance corridor to get nerfed because NYC went too far with it's own pet project and laws got made in response. They'll happily tell the states "no you can't do this thing we do" in order to preserve their own ability to do the thing.

Second is that the feds don't like that the public is becoming soured on the regulatory hackjobs of the 1970s that were hailed as great successes at the time. As the country becomes more divided people are realizing that the current "have the feds grand fund everything at least in part" paradigm results in strings that nobody wants being attached to everything. So doing one little thing that everyone agrees on is seen as a way to say "look we can do good with this power we really shouldn't have in the first place".