- A lawsuit filed by the Kansas Justice Institute alleges that Wichita’s ALPR surveillance program violates the Kansas Constitution’s privacy protections by tracking citizens without warrants or judicial supervision.
By themselves, license plates, which debuted in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, are pretty low-tech. But when combined with a network of AI-assisted automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), those aluminum rectangles stamped with numbers and letters become tracking devices that can provide a comprehensive history of a driver’s movements, potentially revealing sensitive information about his habits, health, relationships, political affiliations, and religious beliefs.
Police departments across the country nevertheless deploy such systems and routinely search the information they collect without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, a warrant, or any sort of judicial supervision. Police in Wichita, Kansas, for instance, have access to data from about 200 Flock Safety ALPR cameras, which are deployed widely enough that it is nearly impossible for the average driver to avoid surveillance as he goes about his daily life. That program violates the Kansas Constitution’s privacy protections, according to a lawsuit that the Kansas Justice Institute (KJI) filed this week in the Sedgwick County District Court.
The plaintiff in Grimmett v. Wichita, local privacy activist Mason Grimmett, “is a law-abiding citizen trapped in Wichita’s warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program,” says Sam MacRoberts, KJI’s litigation director. “He’s done absolutely nothing wrong, but he’s still being tracked, monitored, and databased. That’s unconstitutional. If Wichita wants to track its citizens, it needs to go to a judge and get a warrant.”…