With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone’s location information. This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.
If police want the power to track a person’s movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for “haha.”
The blog post’s conclusion suggest an answer: