Mass surveillance authorized on NC highways, all other state roads

North Carolina law enforcement agencies are now authorized to place cameras alongside state-maintained roads to track who is driving and where, due to a provision tucked into the new state budget that essentially enables a permanent, statewide surveillance program.

Automatic licence plate readers, or ALPRs, record the license plates of every vehicle driving by as well as the make, model and color of their vehicles. Then, using artificial intelligence, they cross-reference that information with various law enforcement databases. Hits might come back for stolen cars, criminal suspects, missing people or other reasons.

The cameras have had success stories, such as helping catch a former Chapel Hill police officer who authorities arrested in Florida earlier this year on allegations of planning a mass shooting at a New Orleans festival. But the cameras aren’t perfect and sometimes lead to mistakes, such as causing an innocent woman to be arrested and falsely accused in Fayetteville, which eventually caused the city to apologize and pay her $60,000.

Some towns and counties have already been allowing the cameras on local roads, but the major highways and other state-maintained roads used to be off-limits. Skeptical state lawmakers — on the left and right alike — fought for years to keep the cameras off state roads. Several more libertarian-minded Republicans had previously joined forces with some Democrats to raise concerns about the program violating drivers’ constitutional rights and creating a slippery slope toward Big Brother authoritarianism.

They’ve now lost that fight. The legislature authorized a pilot program tracking highway drivers in 2023, with 32 of North Carolina’s hundreds of law enforcement agencies participating. The new budget makes that program permanent, and open to any agency in the state. 

That was requested by the State Bureau of Investigation, which submitted a report to the legislature in April detailing its “goal of covering all entrances and exits to North Carolina” with AI-enabled cameras tracking drivers.

When asked about it by WRAL after budget votes, the top Republican legislative leaders — House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate leader Phil Berger — each said that anyone going out in public can legally be photographed already, so using technology to take and analyze millions of photos of vehicles is just a next step in protecting the public.

“I don't think that it's a real breach of civil liberties,” Hall said. “If you're driving down a public highway, you're out in the public anyway, so you don't really have much expectation of not being seen out there. So I think on balance, the benefit that it does in public safety — whether it's somebody kidnapped or whether they're trying to find somebody who's just committed some major crime or whether they're trying to find an elderly person — all of that outweighs the concerns.”

Berger gave similar reasoning. “People are driving their vehicles in public,” he said. “Anybody who is there is there to see it. I think we've always got to be a little concerned about an overuse of technology, but I believe this is an appropriate step.”

Those answers haven’t swayed skeptics.

“They're going to have these effectively mass surveillance cameras and a mass surveillance system in their communities without fully understanding the scope of what these cameras are capturing,” said Zac Contreras, a spokesman for the ACLU of North Carolina.

There are concerns police officers could misuse the system for personal reasons, he said, such as by keeping tabs on the whereabouts of a romantic partner or ex-partner. There’s also potential for the system to be abused in officially sanctioned ways, he said, such as government officials ordering surveillance of political protesters or certain types of healthcare providers.

A WRAL analysis of internal policies for the agencies participating in the state’s ALPR pilot program shows that two of the 32 agencies, the Asheville and Raleigh police departments, address such concerns at least in part. The other 30 have no such policies.

Asheville instructs officers to “attempt to avoid” surveilling attendees of political rallies, religious gatherings or protests unless necessary for an ongoing criminal investigation. Raleigh tells officers not to conduct surveillance “based solely on a protected class [such as] race, sex, religion.”

The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that represents people in cases related to what it calls “widespread abuses of government power,” has documented at least 21 cases of police officers nationwide being accused of using the cameras to stalk their romantic interests as of June 30. In the two weeks since then, news reports from Georgia and Wisconsin detail at least six more police officers arrested on allegations of misusing license plate readers.

In 2019, when several conservative state lawmakers succeeded in killing their party’s plan to authorize license plate readers on state roads, Republican Reps. Michael Speciale, Larry Pittman and Keith Kidwell spoke out against the plan.

“I do sincerely not trust the government," Pittman said at the time, WRAL reported. “I do sincerely fear what types of things might be done with this capability down the road.”

By 2023 when the pilot program was authorized, however, Speciale and Pittman were out of the legislature. Kidwell lost his primary election in March.

Law enforcement agencies have since had more time to report back on uses of the technology they’d like to highlight to state leaders such as Hall, who took over leadership of the state House last year.

“I've heard of many examples where these have come into play,” Hall said. “You have kids getting kidnapped, for example, and it's been useful in trying to find them. The most often thing that's occurring now? Folks who have some sort of cognitive issue, whether they have Alzheimer's or dementia, and they get in a car and start driving, and don't know where they're at, their family can't find them. They've literally found people with these.”

The SBI report to lawmakers earlier this year also notes that the technology has helped clear at least one innocent person who had been under investigation for a murder, by confirming the alibi she had given to police.

And in a small number of cases, they said, they’ve used the technology to stop crimes from happening in the first place — such as one agency that received a tip about someone planning to drive from New Jersey to North Carolina with a shipment of drugs and was stopped shortly after entering North Carolina due to ALPRs, or another man driving from Atlanta into western North Carolina, who police say they caught with a large haul of meth.

“Investigators used ALPRs to identify vehicles the suspect used to transport drugs,” the report says. “Investigators located the suspect vehicle and attempted a traffic stop. The suspect set fire to his car and fled on foot; he was subsequently arrested. Investigators located 50 kilograms of methamphetamine in the vehicle along with a handgun.”

As part of a report the SBI sent lawmakers this year about the pilot program, the SBI noted that Raleigh police set up three cameras along state roads, which have recorded more than 14.8 million drivers and generated 956 “hits” in various law enforcement databases.

The report doesn’t mention how many, if any, of those hits helped lead to an arrest, a rescue, a recovery of a stolen car or any other outcome. Raleigh police officials didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on that report or ALPRs in general.

The sheriffs in Harnett, Franklin and Person counties, as well as the Henderson Police Department, have put up a combined 40 cameras, recording 23.3 million drivers as of March, according to the SBI report.

No other central North Carolina agencies have cameras up through the pilot program; it’s yet to be seen how many will set up cameras now that the program is open to all.

The ACLU of North Carolina was involved in past efforts to stop ALPRs from expanding in the state. They’ve now moved on to pushing for reforms that would add more privacy protections into the way North Carolina handles this data.

“These technologies being used to stalk an individual — you should be able to figure out which law enforcement officer is doing that to address it immediately,” Contreras said. 

However, he added, that’s not always possible in practice because of the ways police agencies sometimes regulate themselves. “If they do have a description of the reason they access the data, oftentimes it's very broad and non-descriptive,” Contreras said. “So then you can't actually, in the event that the system is abused or misused, figure out who did it.”

State law makes misuse of ALPRs a Class 1 misdemeanor charge, although there are no rules that law enforcement agencies must follow to stop or catch violations. The state does require agencies to have a policy for using ALPRs, but the details are entirely up to individual agencies to make as strict or as lax as they desire.

The SBI report doesn’t say whether any of the agencies participating in the pilot program identified any confirmed or suspected misuse of the footage. It also doesn’t say whether any of the agencies attempted to look for abuses. It instead focuses on success stories reported by the agencies in the pilot program.

“ALPRs allow law enforcement officers to find vehicles that were near or at the scene of a crime, such as a homicide,” the report says. “Access to this type of instantaneous information has proven to be an invaluable tool for law enforcement.”