A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide

US lawmakers plan to introduce an amendment Thursday at a House committee markup hearing that would prohibit any recipient of federal highway funding from using automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling—a sweeping restriction that, if adopted, would bring an immediate end to state and local ALPR programs across the United States.The amendment, obtained first by WIRED, is sponsored by Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and Freedom Caucus member, and Representative Jesús “Chuy” García, an Illinois progressive whose state has become a flash point in the national fight over ALPR misuse.The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will mark up the underlying bill—a $580 billion, five-year reauthorization of federal surface transportation programs—at 10 am ET on Thursday.Neither Perry nor García's offices immediately responded to WIRED's request for comment.The amendment runs a single sentence: “A recipient of assistance under Title 23, United States Code, may not use automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling.”The amendment is brief, but its reach would be vast. Title 23 funds roughly a quarter of all public road mileage in the US, including most state and county arteries and many city streets where ALPR cameras are becoming ubiquitous. Conditioning that funding on a ban of the technology would, in practical effect, force any state, county, or municipality that takes federal highway money (essentially all of them) to either remove the cameras or restructure their use around tolling alone.The amendment’s cosponsors, Perry and García, represent opposite ends of the House’s ideological spectrum but converge on a surveillance concern that has gathered momentum in legislatures and city halls across the US as ALPR networks have quietly become a pervasive layer of American road infrastructure.ALPR cameras—mounted on poles, overpasses, traffic signals, and police cruisers—photograph every passing license plate, log times and locations, and feed data into searchable databases shared across agencies and jurisdictions.In Illinois, where García's district sits, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced last August that an audit by his office had found Flock Group—the Atlanta-based company that operates the country's largest ALPR network—in violation of state law for giving US Customs and Border Protection access to Illinois ALPR data. Giannoulias ordered the company to cut off federal access.Flock said at the time that it would pause federal pilots nationwide, arrangements the company had previously denied existed in what Flock CEO and founder Garrett Langley said were public statements that “inadvertently provided inaccurate information.”In response to WIRED's request for comment, Flock spokesperson Josh Thomas points to recent coverage of police advocates in Austin, Texas, championing ALPRs after law enforcement in Manor, a nearby suburb, said they used the technology to help apprehend one of three suspects they claim are connected to a dozen shootings and other recent crimes.Austin city manager TC Broadnax effectively ended the city's use of Flock cameras last year amid public outcry over privacy concerns and against the wishes of the Austin Police Department.“We hope the Committee members review this amendment carefully before heading down a similar path that would leave our first responders without the tools they need to keep residents safe,” Thomas says.Privacy advocates have long warned that the aggregation of license plate data amounts to a de facto warrantless tracking system. New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice has documented the integration of ALPR feeds into police data-fusion systems that combine plate data with surveillance and social media monitoring. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, has documented a range of police misuse, including the past targeting of mosques and the disproportionate deployment of the technology in low-income neighborhoods.