Your daily drive along California’s border highways is being monitored by a covert federal surveillance system you never agreed to—and likely never noticed. Privacy advocates have discovered approximately 40 automated license plate readers hidden throughout San Diego and Imperial counties, disguised inside construction barrels and feeding data directly to federal predictive intelligence programs.
Construction Barrels Hide Advanced Tracking Technology
Disguised surveillance devices mirror covert networks already documented in Arizona border regions.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Imperial Valley Equity and Justice identified the hidden cameras through public records requests, revealing installations by U.S. Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration on state highways. These aren’t your typical traffic cameras—they’re sophisticated ALPR systems that capture and store license plate data from every passing vehicle, creating detailed travel pattern databases for federal analysis.
Algorithms Flag ‘Suspicious’ Driving Patterns
Federal predictive systems target ordinary behaviors like taking longer routes or making multiple trips near the border.
Border Patrol’s predictive intelligence program analyzes ALPR data to identify supposedly suspicious patterns, according to an Associated Press investigation from November. The system flags behaviors like taking six hours to drive 50 miles from the Mexico border to Oceanside—patterns that could describe anyone dealing with traffic, making stops, or simply taking their time…