Lawsuit against automatic license plate reader cameras can move forward, judge says

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that a lawsuit challenging a Virginia city’s use of automatic license plate readers can move forward.

Norfolk, Virginia currently deploys 172 license plate reader cameras through a five-year contract with Flock Safety, and plans to add 65 additional cameras, according to the ruling.

The cameras record all vehicles within 150 feet, and law enforcement can then upload the data they collect to a server which uses machine learning to generate a “vehicle fingerprint” and stores the information for at least 30 days.

In October, the Institute for Justice — a nonprofit public interest law firm — filed a lawsuit on behalf of two area residents arguing the cameras amount to “warrantless surveillance of their every move,” because anyone with access to the Flock database can track where a vehicle has travelled.

Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot has said Flock offers “a nice curtain of technology,” making it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”  

In his ruling, Virginia federal judge Mark Davis said the plaintiffs “sufficiently alleged” the cameras violate their Fourth Amendment rights protecting against unreasonable search and seizures by the government, citing a 2018 Supreme Court case that held that a warrant is needed to use mobile device location data to monitor individuals’ movements.

Pointing to Supreme Court precedent, Davis wrote that “it is society's understanding that law enforcement would not, and could not, secretly monitor and catalogue an individual's every movement over a long period of time, meaning that such extensive information gathering is a violation of society's objective expectations of privacy.”

“Accordingly, such ‘drag-net’ practices are considered a search.”

The lawsuit could have far-reaching implications — Flock says that its cameras are used in more than 5,000 communities nationwide.