Two people in Virginia asked the courts how often the police cameras in Norfolk had photographed their cars. The answers were 526 and 849, over about four months. Neither was under investigation. A federal judge read those numbers and ruled that none of it counted as a search.
The obvious explanation is that a public street is public. For most of the last century that was the law. In 2018 the Supreme Court broke it: pulling months of a person’s phone location out of the company that stored it was a search — not because any street was private, but because accumulation turns a journey into a life. The phrase the court used was the whole of a person’s movements.
That converts a question about rights into a question about arithmetic. How far back does it go? Virginia caps its licence plate cameras at 21 days, and the judge decided three weeks of ordinary driving, with gaps where the cameras do not reach, is not yet the whole of anything. So the network is lawful because of a number — and somebody chose that number.
In a few places a legislature weighed it. Virginia’s 21 days came from its state legislature; Illinois allows up to five years for records tied to an investigation; New Hampshire wrote the strictest rule in the country — no match, and the photograph is destroyed within three minutes and never sent anywhere. Same cameras, same company, three minutes in one state and five years in another.
In most of the country nobody weighed anything. As of August 2026 Congress had written no federal law on these cameras at all. Where a state has not legislated, the retention period is whatever the product does out of the box — and on 13 August 2026 the company behind most of these cameras moved its default from thirty days to seven, by announcement. The number a federal judge treated as the line between lawful and unlawful is, in a great many towns, a field in a settings menu.
Nobody ever bought a network. A single camera costs about $3,000 a year on a subscription, and the department does not own the hardware. It goes to a town council, it is approved, and it gets no hearing, because nothing that costs $3,000 gets a hearing. And they work: the company credits its cameras with roughly a million closed investigations and ten thousand missing people found in the year to August 2026 — a figure from the seller, though the mayor who later switched his own city’s cameras off said plainly they had helped his police department.
By August 2026 more than 5,000 police agencies had made that same small decision, running over 120,000 cameras across 49 states and photographing more than 20 billion vehicles a month. What the town bought was not a camera. It was a subscription to a shared archive, searchable by other agencies. Each decision was local and modest. The sum is a national record of where cars go, which no national body ever approved, because none was ever asked.
On 26 August 2026 Tempe, Arizona switched off every plate camera it owned and said it would not look for another supplier. Three hours later the neighbouring town of Cave Creek did the same. Tempe votes reliably Democratic; Cave Creek leans Republican; neither had to be talked into it. By late August 2026 something like ninety towns and cities had cancelled or refused these contracts.
But a driver in Tempe is still photographed on crossing into a town that kept its cameras, and that record sits in that town’s archive. Everything Tempe’s own cameras collected before the switch is still in other agencies’ hands. You can vote to stop paying for it. You cannot vote to stop being seen by it.
As of August 2026 the company had confirmed that it does not proactively audit how its system is used — not who searched, not why, not whether the stated reason was true. The logs exist; the agency doing the searching is the one that reads them, if anyone does. On 19 August 2026 the Washington Post counted more than fifty American officers accused, charged or convicted of misusing plate reader systems, including to follow former partners.
Nobody was checking upward either: answering a Democratic senator, the company confirmed several federal agencies had pilot access — and that its own police customers had been told it had no dealings with them. Then the detail that decided it in Tempe: the city audited the system before pulling the plug, and found nothing. No misuse, no violations. The council closed the programme anyway, having decided a clean audit from the people running the system was not evidence it wanted to rely on.
Five months after the Norfolk ruling, on 29 June 2026, the Supreme Court held 6–3 that reaching into stored location data is a search — even for a short stretch, and even though the records sit on another company’s servers. Two hours of it, the court noted, is enough to place a person at a gun show or a political rally. Which is to say the judge who upheld Norfolk had been working from a rule the Supreme Court had not yet written.
The court named what bothered it: surveillance that is retrospective and indiscriminate — collected on everybody, in advance, searched backwards once somebody becomes interesting. That is a description of a plate camera network. So Norfolk went to appeal, while a different federal appeals court has already looked at plate readers and said they are not a search either. A court can strike a number down. It has no way to supply the next one.
Delete on sight ends the constitutional argument because there is no archive — and ends retrospective search, which is the entire reason these networks were bought. A warrant for the query guards the door instead, but you will write an emergency exception, and the exception is where the argument moves next; a warrant also binds the government, not the archive, which is also sold to homeowners’ associations and private businesses. Put the number in law and pay a referee, and you discover the referee has never been funded anywhere — and that legislating retention concedes the network should exist. Cut the wires, and cars vanish at the county line, because the shared archive is what made the subscription cheap enough for a small department in the first place.
526 photographs. 849. Two people never accused of anything, in a city that did nothing unusual, in a system a court found lawful because of a number Virginia’s legislature happened to pick — while in most of the country nobody picked it at all.
How many days does your town keep the records, and who is allowed to change that? And on the day you vote to switch them off, what happens to everything already collected? Somebody in your town can answer both.