1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

I'm writing as a constituent to ask you to support legislation requiring police to get a warrant before searching stored license plate reader data. ALPR cameras log where our cars are, and the databases hold months or years of those records. Assembled, they show where someone goes, when, and who they were with — the level of detail that used to take a detective following a car around town. Today, in most places, an officer can pull that history without ever speaking to a judge. EFF has documented what that looks like in practice: officers searching plate data to profile Romani people, to monitor protesters, to investigate someone's abortion, to hunt for immigrants for deportation, to track a man who had complained about a deputy, and to stalk romantic partners. One search was logged with no stated reason beyond "LMAO." A warrant requirement addresses the obvious problem. It forces police to establish probable cause and describe specifically what they're looking for before they access the records, and it puts a judge in the loop rather than leaving people to discover years later that they were tracked. Genuine emergencies would still fall under existing exceptions — nobody expects officers to wait on a judge while a child is missing. I'd also ask that any bill cover "hotlists," the lists that trigger an alert when a camera spots a matching plate. Those can be abused the same way; a Florida deputy was accused of adding a woman he met on a TV set to one so he could keep tabs on her. This isn't a fringe position. A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled earlier this month that these searches require a warrant, and EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are litigating the same practice in San Jose. Please vote yes on a warrant requirement.