A bipartisan amendment would end police license plate tracking nationwide

American lawmakers are planning To introduce an amendment Thursday at a House committee hearing that would bar any recipient of federal highway funding from using it Automated license plate readers for any purpose other than collecting fees, a sweeping restriction that, if adopted, would put an immediate end to state and local ALPR programs throughout the United States.

The amendment, first obtained by WIRED, is sponsored by Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and member of the Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, an Illinois progressive whose state voted for it. It becomes a flash point In the national fight over ALPR abuse.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will draft the primary bill — a five-year, $580 billion reauthorization of federal surface transportation programs — at 10 a.m. ET on Thursday.

Neither Perry nor Garcia’s offices immediately responded to WIRED’s request for comment.

The amendment includes one sentence: “A recipient of assistance under Title 23 of the United States Code may not use automatic license plate readers for any purpose other than to collect tolls.”

The amendment is brief, but its scope will be broad. Title 23 funds nearly a quarter of the total mileage on public roads in the United States, including most state and county arterials and many city streets where ALPR cameras have become ubiquitous. Conditioning this funding on blocking the technology would, in practice, force any state, county, or municipality that takes federal highway funds (essentially all of them) to either remove cameras or restructure their use around tolls alone.

The amendment’s sponsors, Perry and Garcia, represent opposite ends of the ideological spectrum in the House, but they agree on concerns about surveillance that have gained traction in legislatures and city halls across the United States, as ALPR networks have quietly become a widespread layer of America’s road infrastructure.

ALPR cameras — mounted on bollards, bridges, traffic signals and police cruisers — photograph every license plate, registration times and passing locations, feeding the data into searchable databases shared across agencies and jurisdictions.

In Illinois, where Garcia County is located, Secretary of State Alexei Giannoulias announced last August that… Audited by his office Flock Group — the Atlanta-based company that operates the nation’s largest ALPR network — was found to be violating state law for giving U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to ALPR data in Illinois. Giannoulias ordered the company to cut off federal access.

Fluke said at the time that it would temporarily ground federal pilots nationwide, an arrangement the company previously denied. What Flock CEO and Founder Garrett Langley said They were public statements that “inadvertently provided inaccurate information.”

Flock did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Privacy advocates have long warned that collecting license plate data amounts to a de facto warrantless tracking system. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has documented the integration process From ALPR feeds police data fusion systems Which combines panel data, surveillance and social media monitoring. This was done by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization working in the field of digital rights Documented a range of police abuseincluding the targeting of mosques in the past and the disproportionate deployment of technology in low-income neighborhoods.

Court records obtained by EFF and Quoted by 404 Media It was revealed last year that a Texas sheriff’s deputy had queried the national Fluke network — roughly 88,000 cameras at the time — to track a woman because, he wrote, she had “had an abortion.”

“Surveillance cameras are easily abused and have already been banned in many municipalities across the country due to their failure to keep our data safe,” says Hajar Hamadou, senior policy advisor at Demand Progress, who believes the Berry-Garcia amendment “makes sense” and says the country has become a “dystopia of mass surveillance.”