A federal judge has curbed, for now, a class action lawsuit that seeks to put an end to the widespread and growing use by police in Illinois of automated license plate reader systems to combat crime, which the plaintiffs say amounts to unconstitutional high tech "dragnet surveillance" against everyone who drives a vehicle in Chicago and anywhere else in Illinois such license plate reading cameras are deployed.
In the March 31 ruling, U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold sided with the state of Illinois on the legal action's core legal question:
Whether the license plate reader systems violate Illinoisans' Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches by law enforcement.
In the ruling, Pacold said scans and data collection from license plate reader systems do not amount to police "searches" limited by the Fourth Amendment.
Citing prior decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Pacold said: "... As a general matter, 'a person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.'
"To be sure, 'individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements,'" Pacold continued. "But ... Illinois's use of ALPRs, as alleged in the complaint, is not so intrusive as to invade that expectation. It is not a search under the Fourth Amendment."
The lawsuit took aim at the networks of automated license plate readers installed first in Chicago and Cook County, and now cropping up in other communities throughout Illinois.
The ALPRs work through a network of cameras installed along roads and at intersections, where they record the license plates of vehicles passing by. That data is then uploaded into searchable databases available to law enforcement.
Police and other officials have said the systems help police to better track the movements and whereabouts of criminal suspects and reduce crime.
The license plate readers were first authorized in Illinois in 2019 under the state law known as the Tamera Clayton Expressway Camera Act. That law was enacted in response to a 2019 shooting of postal worker Tamera Clayton on Interstate 57.
Under the initial rollout, about 300 plate readers were installed along Cook County's major expressway interstate highways into and out of the city of Chicago.
However, in the years since, the systems have spread to other communities throughout Illinois, as police seek to utilize the new technology to monitor their streets and fight crime, which had spiked in Chicago and elsewhere in the years since 2020, when a large number of state and city officials endorsed criminal justice reforms and policies that critics have said were soft on crime and anti-police.
For instance, after state lawmakers and Pritzker authorized the expansion of the use of plate readers in 2022, Illinois State Police worked with the Illinois Tollway Authority to install plate readers elsewhere in Cook, Kane, Lake, Will, DuPage, DeKalb, Winnebago and Lee counties.
Plate readers have also been installed by the Illinois Department of Transportation downstate in St. Clair County, Morgan County and Champaign County, according to court filings.
According to Illinois State Police data, the ALPR systems have recorded millions of "hits" - or scans of plate numbers flagged by law enforcement for policing purposes - while playing a role in hundreds of millions of "detections," defined as "the capture of digital images or license plates and vehicles with associated metadata," such as GPS coordinates, date and time stamps.
The current vendor for the ISP's ALPR system is Vetted Security Solutions.
In the lawsuit, however, the plaintiffs assert the ALPR systems amount to an unconstitutional "dragnet ... recording the whereabouts of (everyone) who drives a car or truck," whether or not they are accused or suspected of any criminal or suspicious activity.
The lawsuit asserts this system violates the Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches of everyone using Illinois roads. Plaintiffs claim it also violates their Fourteenth Amendment rights.
"... ISP does not even have unreasonable suspicion: they have no suspicion at all," the lawsuit said. "Rather, they collect all the public movements of every car they can in Illinois - and every car they can around the country.
"ISP is tracking the movements of millions of citizens, including Plaintiffs, and just holding onto that mass surveillance data in case one day some police officer decides to target Plaintiffs for specific investigation - warranted or unwarranted."
In a statement released at the time the lawsuit was filed, Bednarz - who is a lawyer - said: "The Fourth Amendment is meant to protect us from unreasonable search and seizure, but how can that right be upheld when the state is perpetually searching every citizen?”
The lawsuit sought injunctions blocking police from operating the plate reader networks and from installing new plate readers elsewhere.
After nearly a year of proceedings, Pacold denied the request for the injunction.
She rejected the plaintiffs' attempt to compare the license plate scans to police gathering cell phone location data without a warrant, and then using that data to re-create a suspect's movements.
While courts have ruled such warrantless acquisition of mobile device location data to be unconstitutional, Pacold said the license plate reader systems are different.
"Knowing what portions of an expressway someone passes tells the government far less about the 'privacies of life,' than data that 'tracks nearly exactly the movements of [a cellphone's] owner,'" Pacold wrote, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Carpenter v United States.
"... ALPRs do not allow the government to 'achieve near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor' to someone."
The judge agreed with the state that the plaintiffs can't show any law enforcement personnel are actively tracking their movements, only that a system is logging records of where their vehicles may have been on public roads at particular moments in time, which police may be able to search at a later time, should the data be needed to aid an investigation.
And the judge said she did not believe plaintiffs could show they had any constitutional right to move about the state without anyone photographing their vehicles or their license plates in public.
Bednarz and Scholl are represented in the case by attorneys from the constitutional rights advocacy organization, the Liberty Justice Center, of Chicago.
A spokesperson for the Liberty Justice Center did not comment on the record concerning the decision Tuesday, but indicated plaintiffs do not intend to abandon the case.
The judge gave plaintiffs until April 30 to file an amended complaint to attempt to remedy the shortcomings identified in the decision.
Plaintiffs can also appeal to the Seventh Circuit.