Over the last decade, a vast number of law enforcement agencies around the country have adopted a mass surveillance technology that uses cameras to track the vehicles of every driver on the road, with little thought or respect given to the ways this technology might be abused. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, that technology may soon be turned against people seeking abortions, the people who support them, and the workers who provide reproductive healthcare.
We’re talking about automated license plate readers (ALPRs). These are camera systems that capture license plate numbers and upload the times, dates, and locations where the plates were seen to massive searchable databases. Sometimes these scans…