Once the use of a surveillance technology is permitted for emergency purposes only, it is only a matter of time before it is used for purposes that fall well outside any rational definition of an emergency.
Take automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, for instance. All across the country, these surveillance cameras capture time-stamped data for passing vehicles (e.g., license plate number, location, color, bumper stickers, items in the back seat), then transfer that information to a searchable nationwide database.
Subsequently, law enforcement can then track the movements of individuals or vehicles suspected of being involved in a crime. Yet, given how the technology works, the day-to-day movements of millions of innocent, law-abiding citizens are also captured and stored, which may sound trivial until you realize this entails not only when you went to the grocery store but also what doctors or attorneys you see, what churches or political protests you attend, and when you last visited the home of a romantic partner.
Law enforcement, when pressed to defend the technology at town halls or by local media, generally downplays perceived threats to privacy, assures concerned citizens that officers won’t be looking into their day-to-day habits unless they’re criminals, and insists ALPRs are a helpful, if not essential, tool for responding to emergency situations and solving serious crimes.
These talking points, sometimes cribbed from vendor scripts, supported with anecdotal evidence, and bolstered with questionable statistics, often seem to be sufficient for most city councils and a lot of their constituents.
However, as this nationwide surveillance program continues to expand, so does the list of acceptable excuses to use it to peep into the lives of unsuspecting people. In practice, once the cameras are in place to rescue kidnapped children and capture serial killers, it is not uncommon for the cameras to become an all-purpose tool pretty quickly.
A recent investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, revealed ALPRs are increasingly used for fairly mundane purposes, such as residency verifications for the parents of children attending public schools, background checks, and investigations of noise complaints, loud parties, and noisy mufflers.
Another recent investigation, this one by the Institute for Justice, revealed numerous cases of members of law enforcement using ALPRs to keep tabs on girlfriends, exes, the friends and family of romantic interests, and hot women they met around town and just wanted to get to know better (sort of like when you were in college, met someone at a party, then checked to see if they had a public Facebook profile).
Hence, in practice, even if you’re not cruising around with dead body in your trunk or speeding away from a bank carrying a sack with a dollar sign on it, you may still have a representative of your local police department accessing data that conveys the most intimate details of your life simply because you enrolled your child in public school, drove past a late night kegger in a college town, or caught the eye of an off-duty officer working security somewhere.
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Furthermore, it makes sense why more and more people are trying to thwart their community’s participation in this growing surveillance network, sometimes with a degree of success.
Yet, given the age in which we live, it is also important to remember that it will take more than getting a handful of municipalities to take down their ALPRs to dismantle our current panopticon, and that ALPRs are far from the only surveillance tool being rolled out with the promise that it will only be used for emergency purposes and serious crimes.
Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.