A Flock Safety license plate reader remains installed on East Adams Street weeks after Flock was supposed to remove them from Syracuse's rights-of-way. Flock and Syracuse police say the readers are no longer active. City officials are working to replace Flock readers with readers made by Axon Enterprise. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current

When Assemblymember Pam Hunter learned that a camera pole installed in her neighbor’s yard was scanning her license plate as she drove by every day, Hunter started digging.

Hunter, a state lawmaker representing the 128th Assembly District, soon learned that she had been driving past a Flock Safety automatic license plate reader, which scanned and stored the license plate number, color, and other identifying characteristics of her vehicle.

Flock’s artificial intelligence-powered scanners now track millions of American drivers’ license plates. The company is one of several that manufactures license plate readers. Flock has amassed a national surveillance network through thousands of local law enforcement agencies, universities, homeowner associations and more clients.

Anyone with access to the network can seamlessly search data from over 80,000 Flock cameras installed throughout the United States, which scan over 20 billion license plates per month.

Flock and many of its customers have hailed that capability as a crucial asset that streamlines criminal investigations. But civil liberties advocates, independent think tanks and lawmakers like Hunter argue the constant surveillance of law-abiding citizens without a warrant or due cause is unconstitutional. 

Hunter is sponsoring a bill to regulate license plate reader surveillance, which has spread throughout New York and much of the nation at an exponential rate with little oversight. The legislation would restrict use cases, limit data retention periods to 48 hours or less, and restrict warrantless data-sharing with out-of-state entities.

“I’m very committed to not having a surveillance state,” Hunter said. “And p.s, I am an Army veteran, and this goes core against any value that I have relative to people’s protections of constitutional rights.”

Since 2025, local officials and police departments, including in Syracuse, have had to question the security of the data their Flock readers were collecting.

The City of Syracuse’s data concerns and contract woes with Flock Safety prompted Hunter to take action against what she called in an interview with Central Current a “weaponization of technology.”

If the bill were to pass, it would prevent license plate readers — which are often presented to local governments and citizens as tools intended to aid police responses and investigations of high-priority incidents like felonies, stolen vehicles, and missing persons — from being used beyond those purposes. 

Police officers have used the devices to stalk women. Kansas cops used license plate readers to track a man who wrote an opinion column criticizing a local police department. An officer in Colorado, acting on data from local license plate readers, wrongly accused a woman of stealing a package, confronting her at her home and boasting, “you can’t take a breath of fresh air in or out without us knowing.”

Daniel Schwarz, a senior policy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union who helped write the legislation, said the bill “strikes a balance” that allows for ALPR data to support “legitimate use cases” without tracking millions of New York state drivers who could have their movement records collected for a “just in case” scenario.

The NYCLU is currently representing multiple New York state residents in a class action lawsuit against Westchester County, alleging that the municipality’s license plate reader surveillance has violated their privacy and civil rights.

“It is not hypothetical. I think the vast majority of harms that we are seeing — whether it is utilizing ALPRS to target immigrant communities, healthcare seekers, protesters — if we get rid of the data quickly enough, we remove harm from this data collection,” Schwarz said.

The longer data is stored before being purged, Schwarz said, the longer bad actors have to access the data, track individuals’ movements and predict movements in the future.

President Donald Trump’s White House last year contracted data analytics and integration firm Palantir Technologies Inc. to build a database on all Americans. Trump has also issued broad directives targeting citizens critical of his administration; the president ordered a crackdown on “domestic terrorism,” tracking social media posts and other first amendment activity to characterize citizens as potential domestic terrorists. 

So-called “fusion centers” — crime analysis labs created in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, where local, state and federal law enforcement pool data to collaborate — are reportedly tracking what they call “anti-technology” extremists, a broad category that appears to include any person skeptical or critical of data centers and AI integration, according to reporting from WIRED.

Hunter’s bill seeks to prevent New York localities’ license plate reader data from feeding into these state and federal surveillance initiatives.

“If we can’t trust the government to protect our constitutional rights, we’re in big trouble,” Hunter said.

The proposed law could greatly reduce the length of time that police departments can store data from license plate readers. The default retention period for many law enforcement agencies, such as the Syracuse Police Department, is 30 days (unless the plate is flagged, allowing the department to store it longer).

Hunter’s legislation calls for a 48-hour retention period. New Hampshire’s data retention period of three minutes  — which Schwarz called the “golden standard” — is still sufficient for law enforcement officers in that state, Hunter said.

“Long enough to read it, run it through a database — gone,” Hunter said.

To Hunter, potential public safety benefits don’t justify actual warrantless surveillance of law-abiding Americans.

Comparing license plate readers to automatic traffic enforcement cameras, Hunter argued that the constant surveillance posed by license plate readers doesn’t respond to crimes, but rather, proactively builds datasets on law-abiding people. Less than one percent of the cars scanned by license plate readers are connected to a crime, according to reporting from the Electronic Frontier Federation.

“It’s not based on some sort of criminal action, like the speed cameras are used for, where you get a violation. It’s tracking a specific violation, for a specific person,” Hunter said. “This purpose, this is just mining data.”

Limiting data storage can safeguard data from being breached by outside actors with unknown motives. The regulation aims to prevent the dissemination and misuse of data by federal immigration agencies, which have already accessed Flock’s network through informal collusion with local officers and formally through a short-lived pilot program with Flock.

The FBI also recently declared its interest in purchasing nationwide LPR data. 

Last year, the Associated Press reported that U.S. Border Patrol agents are using predictive policing models integrated with license plate readers, detaining drivers when an AI algorithm determines the driver displayed “suspicious” driving patterns. Flock in December told Central Current it didn’t create predictive policing models but acknowledged one of the purposes of the data it collects from its own customers includes the “training of machine algorithms.”

The final prong of Hunter’s bill seeks to prevent data flowing from the streets of cities like Syracuse to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and related federal entities by prohibiting out-of-state sharing of LPR data without a warrant. 

Without those protections, Hunter believes that the current license plate reader surveillance across New York state and beyond constitutes an infringement on her own constitutional rights, and those of her constituents and fellow citizens, she said.

“I get the fact that we want to do all we can to give the tools and the toolkit to help law enforcement. I get that,” Hunter said. “I absolutely understand that, but it can’t be with us violating people’s constitutional rights and protection. Can’t be.”

To ensure compliance, the bill would require police departments to maintain audit logs of all queries, publicize reports, and allow individuals harmed by license plate reader use to seek legal recourse.

Hunter and cosponsors introduced the bill shortly before the end of Albany’s legislative session, meaning state lawmakers won’t officially consider it until the start of the next session in January 2027.

She said that she plans to use the summer to do more research and gain more perspective from both citizens and officers. She has already spoken to Syracuse police Chief Mark Rusin and DeWitt police Chief Shane Spencer. Hunter feels she and state lawmakers have an urgent duty to regulate the unprecedented rise of such surveillance across the state.

While state lawmakers will have to wait to consider the bill, the technology’s capacities are growing fast. 

Flock now offers livestream and video recording, digitized heat maps of individuals’ driving movements, a “people” search tool and other software updates.

A separate surveillance company recently announced its intention to integrate a technology called SignalTrace — which can track mobile phones and Bluetooth-enabled devices inside cars — into license plate readers, allowing the scanners to track not just license plates but also wearable technology products like AirPods.

Hunter said that by the time regulations on surveillance technology or other AI-related legislation gets vetted, passed, and signed into law, the relevant technology has often already developed past the newly enacted regulations.

For many New York residents, Schwarz said, the cost of living with at least another six months of unregulated license plate reader surveillance is real.

“It’s risking livelihoods of many, many community members, because we know that ICE is weaponizing this technology. I think there are legitimate fears around what the election this fall will look like,” Schwarz said. “…The longer we wait and we leave this data out, the more risks and dangers there are for people across the state.”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...