Can state police track drivers everywhere they go via hundreds of license plate cameras? A new lawsuit says that Illinois' widespread use of such cameras—called automatic license plate readers (ALPRs)—violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches because it breaches citizens' reasonable expectations of privacy.
The complaint—filed by two residents of Cook County, Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on May 30—names the Illinois State Police (ISP), ISP Director Brendan F. Kelly, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, and Gov. J.B. Pritzker as the defendants.
"Defendants are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County—or to school, or a grocery store, or a doctor's office, or a pharmacy, or a political rally, or a romantic encounter, or family gathering—every day," the lawsuit states, "without any reason to suspect anyone of anything, and are holding onto those whereabouts just in case they decide in the future that some citizen might be an appropriate target of law enforcement."
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reason.com
