Surveillance
The Dystopian Surveillance Programs Right In America’s Heartland
Automatic license plate readers give local police departments powers once available only to the world’s totalitarian regimes.
If you travel any meaningful distance within Illinois via the state’s highways or expressways, a detailed, time-stamped record of your route and approximate destination will be logged by multiple law enforcement agencies.
In part this is due to the state’s massive automatic license plate reader (ALPR) program, which recently expanded to cover approximately 6,600 miles of roadway. The rapid adoption of the technology by local law enforcement agencies has left them with surveillance programs that five years ago most would have thought were the domain of dystopian novels and major cities like London, New York, and Chicago.
In the state of Illinois, as is true for much of the rest of the country, the use of automated license plate readers, commonly referred to as ALPRs, remains largely unregulated; Illinois’s limited restrictions primarily pertain to sharing information that could be used against those seeking abortions or who are in the United States illegally.
Typically placed at intersections or along the side of the road, sometimes attached to police cars, ALPRs log the license plates and other identifying information of passing vehicles. If a passing vehicle is being sought by law enforcement and on a hot list, a notification may be sent out to officers in the area. Otherwise, a vehicle’s data are generally stored in a searchable database for later reference.
“We are seeing them used at all levels of government,” stated Edwin Yohnka, the director of communications and public policy at ACLU Illinois in an early 2023 phone interview with The American Conservative. “The state police have begun a very aggressive campaign of using them on highways and specifically on the expressways in and around Chicago, ostensibly in that instance because they are concerned about…the shootings that have taken place on the expressways over the last couple of years.”
“We’re seeing them used in some instances at the county level where law enforcement officials are using them…as part of regional task forces,” he continued.
In those instances, said Yohnka, the claim is that they are being used to address violent crime in larger communities or in efforts to recover stolen vehicles.
“And finally, at the municipal level,” he said, “there has been over the last twelve to eighteen months a significant push to use the camera systems in communities, you know, whether as large as Chicago or…some suburbs that by comparison are fairly small.”
In such comparatively small communities, Yohnka said, “the cameras are often marketed as a crime-fighting device.”
In the absence of much regulation at the state or national level, policies regarding their use and what if any privacy protections are in place vary considerably by agency and municipality.
“What we’re seeing then,” stated Yohnka, “is an incredible breadth in terms of, for example, how much or how long the data is stored—whether it’s stored for sixty days or ninety days.”
According to Yohnka, when the ACLU-IL did an in-depth analysis of ALPR policies in Illinois several years earlier, some places maintained the data indefinitely.
Given the strict regulations on comparable devices in Illinois such as stingrays, a device that surreptitiously collects data from people’s cell phones, there would seem to be an obvious question of why there is not greater regulation in place regarding the use of ALPRs in Illinois.
In an early 2023 phone interview with TAC, Khadine Bennett, ACLU-IL’s director of advocacy and intergovernmental affairs, explained her organization actually attempted to push for such regulation around the time the stingray legislation was passed but noted the atmosphere for the regulation in that instance was different. Not many jurisdictions at the time were using stingrays, she noted, making it easier to get bipartisan support for regulation.
“When it came time to regulate ALPRs, I think at that point there were probably maybe at least forty localities we knew of based on who responded to a FOIA who were using them,” she said.
When the ACLU-IL attempted to push for the regulation of ALPRs at the state level, Bennett said, ACLU-IL’s starting point in negotiations was a retention period of twenty-four hours for information for vehicles not actively being sought by law enforcement. This, she said, would at least prevent the proliferation of data over time. Law enforcement, however, she said, “started from a place of wanting it forever.”
Subsequently, Bennett said, the ACLU-IL went back and forth with law enforcement over the course of negotiations which came to an end when law enforcement settled on three years and refused to budge. Most localities in Illinois at the time, Bennett said, already had a retention period of 30 days; some had a retention period of only 15 days.
“So at that point,” she said, “our assessment was instead of having this really long retention period of three years…both sides essentially decided not to pursue [it].”
“Also, like there were more law enforcement entities using that kind of technology, so I think once you start using it, there’s a desire to keep using it,” she added.
Yet, even if a retention period of 30 days affords citizens more privacy than a retention period of three years, 30 days can still give law enforcement a considerable window into the private lives of ordinary citizens.
In a recent article published by the Brownstone Institute, Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, commented, “There’s no question that if you get enough license plate readers and you got one on every block, that put together…can create a GPS-tracker-like-record of my movement and even if there’s, you know, only one every ten miles and [I’m] driving around the country, I’m driving from Texas to California or what have you, that can be very revealing as well.”
Bennett, when asked whether people are generally aware of the use of ALPRs in their community, said, “I think it’s mixed in terms of them knowing about it. I think there are maybe some municipalities where folks had no idea, especially if they’re not following what’s happening at the local city council meetings.”
According to Yohnka, two or three years ago it was not uncommon for communities first to become aware of ALPRs in their neighborhood upon seeing them installed well after they were approved. More recently, however, he said, there has been more discussion and debate in at least some local governments in Illinois leading to a little more community awareness.
“When they are proposed, what we’re seeing is a real drive among community members to do, you know, to really kind of do some opposition or ask [for] more information about the privacy policy before they’re adopted,” he stated.
“I think there have been some instances where maybe some ALPRs have been delayed,” said Bennett. “I think we’ve seen cases where community folks have been able to…give input in terms of what the policy is for law enforcement in terms of having some level of transparency and accountability measures in place.”
In most cases, this is all opponents can usually get. Once local law enforcement is sold on the utility of ALPRs, whether as an investigative tool or as a deterrent for criminal activity, the most opponents can often hope for moving forward is a retention period around thirty days and perhaps some agreement to keep records on how the ALPRs are used and assess their effectiveness at a later date.
In the rare instance community members are able to thwart efforts to utilize the devices in their towns, proponents in law enforcement and the media continue the push for ALPRs, sometimes depicting local law enforcement’s inability to use the devices as a hindrance to their ability to fight crime even when evidence demonstrating this is lacking.
Christopher Evans, a city council member from Urbana, Illinois, made this point in a series of email comments in 2023 and 2024.
Through the correspondence he highlighted how Urbana city officials tried to bring ALPRs to Urbana in 2021 to address the uptick in gun violence the city experienced in 2020 and 2021.
This led to considerable debate at city council meetings and within the community. Ultimately, though the city council rejected the implementation of the devices in a four to three vote.
Additionally, as Evans noted, gun violence in Urban began to come down in 2022 and a report from the University of Illinois suggested a neighboring city’s ALPR program seldom facilitated arrests for likely gun felonies.
Nevertheless, Evans pointed out, representatives from local law enforcement have since made misleading statements to the press to garner support for bringing ALPRs to Urbana.
In one example Evans provided, an Urbana police lieutenant downplayed his department’s ability to apprehend a suspect in a case without ALPRs a few days before a suspect was apprehended. In another, the same lieutenant put out a press release in which he credited another town’s ALPRs as having helped apprehend suspects in a well-publicized local robbery even though the devices played absolutely no role.
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