NoPanopticon

ALPR cameras are installed on roadside poles, bridges, and police vehicles. Infrared illuminators let them operate 24/7 in any weather. Each camera captures a hi-res photo of the plate, the vehicle, and the surroundings; optical character recognition converts the plate number to text; and a timestamp and GPS coordinate are added before the record is uploaded to a central server within seconds.

Modern systems can read thousands of plates per hour per camera. Reads are matched against "hot lists" (stolen vehicles, warrants, etc.) in real time and alerts sent to officers. All reads—including vehicles that generate no alert—are retained and made searchable, often for years.

ALPR technology is not limited to dedicated cameras. The same OCR pipeline can be applied to footage from existing city cameras, private security cameras, or doorbell cameras (e.g. Ring), vastly expanding the effective surveillance footprint without deploying new hardware.

ALPR is dragnet surveillance: every driver is recorded regardless of suspicion. Over time, the database reveals where people live, work, worship, seek medical care, and associate—a comprehensive portrait of private life built without a warrant.

Shared networks like TALON (Flock) and LEARN (Motorola/Vigilant) let agencies query plates across jurisdictions, so a single car can be tracked across the country by any subscribing agency. "Hot lists" that trigger alerts are often populated with people who have unpaid fines or fees—civil matters—with little oversight over who gets added or removed.

ALPR data has already been used to criminalize people crossing state lines for abortion care, and to circumvent sanctuary city policies by sharing data with ICE and federal fusion centers. Studies suggest error rates of 10% or higher in some systems; misreads have led to officers drawing weapons on innocent drivers.

Dedicated ALPR cameras and reader units are sold by:

• Flock Safety – Falcon series pole-mounted cameras; Falcon LR for highways; Falcon Flex for temporary deployment
• Motorola Solutions / Vigilant – fixed and mobile ALPR units; mobile units mount on patrol cars and read plates on parked vehicles as the officer drives
• ELSAG (Leonardo DRS) – fixed, mobile, and portable ALPR; widely used by state police and toll agencies
• Rekor Systems – AI-based ALPR for roads and parking, with a vehicle analytics layer
• Genetec – ALPR hardware and software integrated into their AutoVu platform
• Hikvision / Dahua – lower-cost ALPR-capable cameras used internationally and increasingly in the US, despite federal restrictions on procurement

• TALON / FlockOS – Flock Safety's cloud platform; every read from every Flock customer is pooled into a shared searchable database accessible to all subscribers
• LEARN – Motorola/Vigilant's national ALPR database; one of the largest in the US with billions of records
• AutoVu – Genetec's ALPR platform, integrating hardware reads into the Security Center VMS
• OpenALPR / Rekor Scout – software-only ALPR that can run on commodity cameras or cloud video
• DRN (Digital Recognition Network) – private ALPR network built from repossession and parking enforcement scanners; data sold to insurers, lenders, and law enforcement