A network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) mounted on police cars, streetlights, and highway overpasses captures billions of license plate scans annually, building detailed movement profiles of virtually every driver. Private company Flock Safety has created a de facto nationwide surveillance system, running all plates against FBI databases. NYPD used ALPRs to spy on Muslims at mosques. Data shows disproportionate deployment in communities of color. 100% of departments serving 1M+ residents use the technology.
“Police and private companies are building a massive database of every car's movements using automatic license plate readers. They know where you go, when, and how often.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
Every day, millions of Americans drive past cameras they never knew were watching. Mounted on police cruisers, streetlights, and highway overpasses across the country, automated license plate readers snap photos of vehicles and their occupants—billions of times per year—creating a permanent digital record of where nearly every driver goes.
What started as a tool to catch stolen cars has quietly evolved into something far more expansive. Law enforcement agencies and private companies are now assembling the most comprehensive tracking database ever built on the American public, and for years, the full scope of this system remained largely hidden from public view.
The technology itself is straightforward. Cameras capture license plates, optical character recognition software reads them instantly, and the data flows into searchable databases. A single police department might process hundreds of thousands of scans daily. When multiplied across thousands of agencies nationwide, the numbers become staggering—billions of records accumulating year after year, each one a breadcrumb trail documenting where a person traveled.
For advocates raising alarms about mass surveillance, the response from law enforcement was predictable: these systems were limited in scope, tightly regulated, and used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes. Privacy concerns were dismissed as overblown. The technology was too specialized, too localized, to constitute any real threat to privacy.
But evidence tells a different story. According to reporting by civil rights organizations including the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation, virtually every major police department in America—100 percent of those serving cities with populations over one million—now operates ALPR networks. Private companies like Flock Safety have become critical infrastructure for this surveillance apparatus, running captured plates against FBI databases in real time.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
The specifics reveal how this system functions without meaningful oversight. NYPD officers used license plate readers to track vehicles at mosques, documenting patterns of Muslim Americans' religious attendance and movements. Across the country, deployment data shows these readers are disproportionately concentrated in communities of color, raising serious questions about how this technology amplifies existing disparities in policing.
What makes this particularly significant is that most people have no idea this surveillance infrastructure exists. Unlike security cameras at airports or checkpoints, license plate readers operate invisibly, their presence unmarked and their data collection undocumented in public discourse. A driver might be tracked dozens of times weekly without any notification or opportunity for consent.
The implications extend beyond law enforcement. Once data is collected and centralized, it becomes vulnerable to misuse—by bad actors with database access, by government agencies seeking information on protest attendance or political organizing, or simply through negligence in how information is stored and protected.
This is not speculation about what could happen. This is documentation of what has already happened. The infrastructure is built. The data is being collected. The only remaining questions concern oversight, regulation, and whether Americans will demand accountability for a tracking system they never agreed to in the first place.
When privacy advocates raised these concerns years ago, they were often dismissed. Now the evidence is unavoidable. The claim was never a conspiracy. It was a documented reality that authorities hoped would remain invisible.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.6% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~150Network
Secret kept
10.5 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
