Evidence and Sources

We are not claiming Liberty's program is illegal. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court recognized that a long record of a person's movements is private even when each trip happens in public, and can require a warrant to obtain.

Courts are still drawing the line for networked license plate readers, and we state that plainly: no controlling court has held a system like Liberty's unconstitutional — and none has held that a dense, retrospectively searchable, cross-jurisdictional ALPR network is categorically constitutional either. The Sixth Circuit has ruled there is no privacy expectation in the plate itself; the question courts keep reserving is what happens when thousands of time-and-place observations are aggregated into a searchable history. In June 2026, the Supreme Court held in Chatrie that pulling historical phone-location records is a search even for short periods — not an ALPR case, but the clearest signal yet that comprehensiveness, not duration alone, drives the analysis. Norfolk's Flock system survived at the district court on its specific facts; that decision is on appeal.

Which is exactly why waiting for a court is the wrong plan. The law sets a floor, not a policy. Trustees don't need a ruling that the cameras are illegal to decide the township shouldn't fund a system whose retention keeps growing capability, whose sharing reaches nationwide, and whose oversight is one internal memo a year. Removal now, while the network here is still small, doesn't require winning a constitutional case — it requires a vote.