The amendment, first obtained by WIRED, is sponsored by Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and Freedom Caucus member, and Representative Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, a progressive from Illinois, whose state has become a flash point in the national fight over ALPR abuse.
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 a.m. ET on Thursday.
Neither Perry nor Garcia’s offices immediately responded to WIRED’s request for comment.
The amendment runs one sentence: “A recipient of assistance under title 23, United States Code, may not use an automated license plate reader for any purpose other than tolling.”
The amendment is brief, but its reach will be broad. Title 23 covers approximately a quarter of all public road mileage in the US, including most state and county arterials and many city streets where ALPR cameras are becoming ubiquitous. Stipulating that funding to ban the technology would, in practical effect, force any state, county, or municipality that takes federal highway funds (essentially all of them) to either remove the cameras or restructure their use around tolling alone.
The amendment’s sponsors, Perry and Garcia, represent opposite ends of the House’s ideological spectrum, but agree on a surveillance concern that has gained momentum in legislatures and city halls across the US as ALPR networks quietly become a pervasive layer of American road infrastructure.
ALPR cameras—mounted on poles, overpasses, traffic signals, and police cruisers—take photos of every passing license plate, log times and locations, and feed the data into a searchable database shared across agencies and jurisdictions.
In Illinois, where Garcia’s district is located, 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 nation’s largest ALPR network – to be in violation of state law by providing U.S. 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, with the company previously denying the arrangement had been made after Flock CEO and founder Garrett Langley made public statements that “inadvertently provided false information.”
Flock did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Privacy advocates have long warned that the collection of license plate data is tantamount to a de facto warrantless tracking system. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has documented the integration of ALPR feeds into a police data-fusion system that combines plate data with surveillance and social media monitoring. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, has documented a range of police abuses, including past targeting of mosques and disproportionate deployment of the technology in low-income neighborhoods.
Court records obtained by EFF and reported by 404 Media last year revealed that a Texas sheriff’s deputy questioned Flock’s nationwide network — about 88,000 cameras at the time — to track a woman who, as he wrote, had “had an abortion.”
“Swarm cameras are easily misused and have already been banned in many municipalities across the country due to their failure to keep our data secure,” says Hajar Hammado, senior policy advisor at Demand Progress, who believes the Perry-Garcia amendment is “common sense” and says the country has become a “mass surveillance dystopia.”
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