Guest Columnist Jeff Pierson: A Liberty Response — Policy Questions and Answers: The Network Camera State

July 17, 2026

A Liberty Response — Policy Questions and Answers: The Network Camera State

A companion to “A Liberty Response to Flock and the Networked Camera State.” These are the questions most often raised when a community debates automated license plate readers (ALPRs) — asked plainly, and answered with sources. The audience is the public: neighbors, council members, and anyone deciding whether a searchable record of everyone’s movements should exist in their town.

By: Jeff Pierson

Q1. Couldn’t a neutral third party run the searches and report to a citizens committee?

The question: Has it ever been suggested that a local third party do the searches, document the legitimacy and warrants, and then report to a citizens committee? Why does that not pass the liberty test?

Yes, it has been proposed, and even tried. Warrant requirements (a judge approves each search before it runs) have been proposed in several states. The ACLU’s “Community Control Over Police Surveillance” model, adopted in roughly two dozen cities, requires council approval, published use policies, and annual public reports. Oakland, California maintains a standing Privacy Advisory Commission that reviews surveillance use and reports to the city council. Some agencies restrict sensitive database queries to a small trained unit, the closest thing to “a third party runs the searches.” At the federal level, the FISA Court is exactly this idea: an independent body reviews the legitimacy of each surveillance request in advance.

So the model exists. The reason it does not pass the liberty test is that every version of it governs who may open the filing cabinet while leaving the filing cabinet standing. Five specific problems:

• The database still gets built. The core hazard is not the query; it is the existence of a permanent, searchable record of where everyone goes. A committee regulates retrieval. It does nothing about collection, and collection is the injury. The record sits waiting for the committee to be dissolved, captured, defunded, or overruled by a future council.
• Downstream controls have already failed in the field. A committee reviewing search logs is structurally the same safeguard as the audit log, a receipt, not a check. It depends on honest logging, and the public record shows one department entering “investigation” as its search reason 111 times and “hehehe” 20 times in a single month, with every search going through.¹
• A local committee cannot control non-local access. Mountain View, California discovered that a nationwide sharing setting had been switched on without its own police department’s knowledge, exposing 29 of its 30 cameras to outside agencies; the city called it “a system failure on Flock Safety’s part.”² No citizens committee in your town has jurisdiction over a federal agency’s query or a vendor-side setting.
• Volume defeats meaningful review. A lawsuit complaint alleges San Jose’s plate database alone was searched nearly four million times in one year.³ No volunteer body can genuinely adjudicate that; review collapses into sampling and rubber-stamping. The best-resourced gatekeeper ever built for this purpose (the FISA Court) has historically approved more than 99 percent of applications.⁴
• The chilling effect does not care who runs the query. Knowing that your drive to a clinic, a gun store, a union hall, or a protest generates an entry in a police-searchable database chills free association whether the searcher is a detective or a vetted intermediary.

One honest concession: a genuine warrant requirement would substantially reduce the stalking-by-officer cases, because those are querying abuses.⁵ What no gatekeeper can fix is the part the liberty argument rests on: a suspicionless movement record of the innocent, governed by a policy any future council can amend, rather than by the decision not to build the record at all.

Q2. If Flock or another vendor owns the data, is accountability harder?

The question: If Flock or a vendor owns the data, is accountability harder, and why?

Yes, substantially, and through specific mechanisms. Vendor ownership, or even vendor control short of ownership, weakens nearly every accountability tool that exists for government records:

• Public-records law stops at the vendor’s door. Freedom-of-information laws bind government agencies, not private companies. When the data lives on the vendor’s servers under the vendor’s terms, a city can answer a records request with “we don’t possess that.” The public visibility that exists today, the audit-log datasets journalists and civil-liberties groups have analyzed, exists only because those logs were obtainable. Flock has since reduced the detail in its audit logs,⁶ and its February 2026 standard terms give the company “the exclusive right to determine and control the method, timing, format, and medium” of even the customer’s access to its own data.⁷
• Constitutional claims are harder to attach. The Fourth Amendment restrains the government. When collection and storage are privately owned, defendants argue you “shared” your movements with a private company. Recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened that argument for location data, but none has settled it for plate readers, which is precisely why the question is being litigated now.⁸
• Audits and discovery run through a party with adverse interests. When a city owns its records, a subpoena or a council order reaches them directly. When a vendor owns them, litigants and auditors must pry data from a company whose commercial interest is in minimizing disclosed misuse. Mountain View could not audit settings it did not control; it learned of outside access after the fact.²
• Democratic control becomes contract renegotiation. A council can order its own police department to purge records tomorrow. Against a vendor, the same instruction is a contract dispute governed by terms the vendor drafts and revises. The ACLU documented that the sentence “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data,” present in earlier terms, is absent from the current version, a change most customer cities never voted on.⁷
• Liability diffuses. When a misread plate ends with a family held at gunpoint, the city points at the vendor’s algorithm and the vendor points at the officer. The settlements on the public record, $1.9 million in Aurora, $495,000 and $49,500 in San Francisco-area cases, were paid by cities, not by the vendor whose read started the chain.⁹

There is also a structural point: vendor ownership converts the population’s movement history into a corporate asset, something that persists through acquisitions, bankruptcies, and product pivots. A city’s decision to cancel its contract does not obviously claw that asset back.

Q3. What happens if ALPR vendors sell the data, and is “de-identified” real?

The question: What are the issues, likely and worst case, if ALPR vendors sell data? Does it violate rights? Is the data truly de-identified, given that large data stores can tie home addresses to everything from grocery purchases to “anonymous” transactions?

The likely case is already happening. A private market for plate scans has existed for years: camera fleets mounted on repossession trucks, operated by companies such as Digital Recognition Network and Vigilant Solutions, have sold billions of scans to lenders, insurers, repossession agents, and private investigators, no warrant, no oversight structure at all.¹⁰ Federal immigration authorities have accessed a commercial plate database by contract.¹¹ So the realistic near-term picture for any vendor that sells is: insurers pricing you by where your car sleeps; investigators offering movement histories to anyone with a retainer, including abusive exes; and government agencies buying commercially what the Constitution might not let them take directly.

The worst case follows from one property: sold data cannot be recalled. Copies propagate through the data-broker ecosystem, and brokers get breached: the January 2025 breach of location broker Gravy Analytics spilled precise location data on millions of people.¹² The end state is a permanent, privately held, resalable national movement dossier: usable to defeat address-confidentiality programs for domestic-violence survivors and judges; to identify who visited an abortion clinic, a gun store, a mosque, or a protest, the Federal Trade Commission has sued a broker for selling exactly that kind of location data¹³), or to be purchased by foreign intelligence services. None of this requires malice. It requires only the sale, plus time.

Does it violate rights? The honest answer is that it circumvents rights more than it violates them, which is arguably worse because it is harder to sue over. The Fourth Amendment binds the government, not private sellers. The constitutional action is in the purchase loophole: if the government needs a warrant to compel your location history, can it simply buy the same history from a vendor? Agencies have taken the position that a purchase is not a “search.” Congress has tried to close the loophole: the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act passed the House in 2024 but has not become law.¹⁴ A patchwork of statutes applies at the edges: the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act restricts matching plates to owners through DMV records, but contains fourteen “permissible use” exceptions;¹⁵ California restricts selling ALPR data; a few states ban private ALPR outright; and the FTC has treated the sale of sensitive location data as an unfair trade practice.¹³

Is “de-identified” real? For location data, no, it is close to a contradiction in terms. Three reasons, in ascending order of decisiveness:

• The plate is itself an identifier. It maps to a registered owner through DMV records that are themselves commercially reachable under DPPA exceptions. “De-identifying” a plate scan means removing the one field whose entire purpose is identification, while the vendor keeps the key.
• Movement patterns re-identify on their own. A landmark study found that just four time-and-place points uniquely identify 95 percent of people in a mobility dataset.¹⁶ A car’s overnight location is a home address; its weekday location is a workplace. The trace is the identity. This is how a supposedly anonymous set of app-location data was enough to publicly identify a Catholic official in 2021.¹⁷
• Joining datasets is the business model, not a bug. De-identification assumes the dataset stands alone. Data brokers exist to join datasets: address files, purchase histories, voter rolls, advertising IDs. Flock’s own described product, “Nova,” links plate data with roughly twenty commercial broker sources so users can “jump from LPR to person.”¹⁸ The moment “anonymous” plate reads are joined to a broker file keyed to home addresses, the anonymity evaporates by design.

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Q4. Misuse is rare. Doesn’t that make it acceptable?

The question: Do occasional violations of rights make a system okay? Is “misuse is rare” what Flock and other vendors really believe?

No, and it is worth seeing exactly why. “Misuse is rare” is not an argument that the misuse is acceptable. It is an argument that it is affordable. Those are different claims. Rights do not work on a rate basis: the entire function of a right is to remove certain harms from cost-benefit math. We do not ask whether the rate of warrantless home searches is low enough to tolerate; one is a violation, and the violated person’s claim is not diluted by the good behavior of ten thousand other officers. “Rare” is how you evaluate defect rates in manufacturing, where the units are interchangeable. The woman whose plate one officer ran nearly 400 times is not a defect rate.⁵ No one defends wrongful convictions by noting that most convictions are sound; we treat each one as a systemic failure, because the harm falls on an identifiable innocent person and the state did it.

The denominator is also doing dishonest work. “Small relative to our user base” compares caught abuse against total users. But catching is the bottleneck: the Institute for Justice found most stalking cases surfaced only because victims discovered the surveillance themselves,⁵ and the search-reason data (“investigation” 111 times; “hehehe” 20 times) shows the logging that would reveal misuse is largely noise.¹ When detection depends on the victim, the observed rate is a floor with no known ceiling, and a company that reduced its own audit-log detail is quoting a numerator it has helped make unknowable.⁶

Is this what the vendor really believes? The most revealing evidence is seven words from Flock’s chief legal officer in a May 2026 radio interview: “very rarely, someone does something stupid.”¹⁹ Three moves are packed in. “Very rarely”: the rate frame. “Someone”, agency displaced onto a bad-apple individual, away from the system that put a movement-tracking tool with a free-text reason field in hundreds of thousands of hands. “Something stupid”: stalking a woman through a police database, reclassified from a rights violation to an error in judgment. Stupid is what you call a typo. Whether executives sincerely believe the framing almost doesn’t matter; it is the framing a vendor must adopt, because the alternative, “our product’s ordinary operation creates the abuse surface”, is an admission no policy patch can fix.

There is a structural reason the framing comes naturally: for the vendor, misuse is an externality. The company keeps the contract revenue; the costs land on the stalked woman, the wrongly detained family, and the city that pays the settlement.⁹ An entity that does not bear the cost of violations will always sincerely experience them as rare and small. That is not deceit, exactly. It is accounting.

Q5. Could a person legally do what the cameras do: follow one individual for days?

The question: What is a First Amendment auditor, can one follow a single individual around for days, and has anyone been prosecuted for similar behavior?

What auditing is. A “First Amendment auditor” is a citizen who openly films in public spaces, post offices, libraries, police-station lobbies, to test whether officials respect the constitutional right to record in public. The legal foundation is real: every federal appeals court to decide the question has held there is a First Amendment right to record public officials performing public duties in public places, subject to reasonable limits.²⁰

But no, an auditor cannot follow one individual for days. The right protects recording in public; it does not protect a course of conduct directed at a person. Every state has a stalking statute, and the typical elements are repeated following or surveillance of a specific person, as a pattern over time, that would cause a reasonable person fear or serious distress. The camera is irrelevant to those elements, filming is the medium; following is the crime. Days of dedicated pursuit of one individual checks every element even if every frame was shot from a public sidewalk.

Yes, people have been prosecuted and enjoined for it. The canonical case is Galella v. Onassis (1973): a photographer made a career of relentlessly pursuing Jacqueline Onassis and her children in public, and the court held the First Amendment gave him no license for persistent individualized pursuit, upholding an injunction that kept him at a distance.²¹ Auditors themselves have crossed the line: an Arizona auditor with a YouTube following pleaded guilty to federal cyberstalking after targeting a specific state employee and directing followers to harass her; the prosecution began precisely when he stopped auditing institutions and started targeting a person.²² Another Arizona auditor was charged with harassment after, among other things, following a woman to her car; the police statement took pains to note that the filming itself was not the crime.²³

Why this matters for plate readers. A human being who follows one person for days, logging where they go, commits a crime in all fifty states, and the First Amendment is no defense. A networked plate-reader system performs the functional equivalent of that following, against everyone, continuously, with each vehicle’s movements reconstructable on demand. Justice Alito made the underlying point from the bench in United States v. Jones: society’s expectations were formed in a world where monitoring someone’s every movement for weeks was practically impossible; the difficulty was the privacy protection.²⁴ Automation deletes the difficulty. And one honest asymmetry: stalking laws generally require the victim to become aware of the conduct, so the more hidden the surveillance, the less the criminal law reaches it. The law already condemns this conduct when it is visible. The network’s defense, in effect, is that it does the same thing invisibly.

Q6. Have courts or the founders ever treated “not being catalogued” as a precondition of freedom?

The question: Has the issue of “preconditions to freedom”, such as requiring personal information to be databased as the price of participating in public life, ever been addressed by courts or by the founders, and is it a relevant analogy?

Yes, by both, and the founding-era version is not an analogy at all. The Fourth Amendment was written against a specific technology of its day: the writ of assistance, a general warrant giving customs officers standing, suspicionless authority to search anywhere, valid for the life of the sovereign. James Otis argued against the writs in Boston in 1761, and his objection was not that they were being abused. It was that the capability itself was intolerable: “It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” He conceded that a specific, sworn, particularized warrant was lawful, his target was the standing general power, however professionally exercised. John Adams, who watched the argument as a young lawyer, wrote later: “Then and there the child Independence was born.”²⁵ A plate-reader network is a general warrant executed by camera: standing, suspicionless, universal, and, like the writs, defended on the ground that respectable officers will use it responsibly. The Fourth Amendment exists because a prior generation refused to wait for the abuse.

The founders practiced what this implies. The Federalist Papers were published as “Publius”; Common Sense appeared anonymously; the Anti-Federalist replies came from “Brutus” and “Cato.” The generation that designed the American system participated in ratifying it under cover of anonymity. They did not regard being identified and registered to the state as the price of entering public life. The counter-tradition is instructive too: where colonial America did build movement-tracking, slave passes, and “lantern laws” requiring enslaved people to carry lights after dark, it was an instrument of subjugation, and the free/unfree line ran, in part, exactly along who could move unregistered.²⁶

Courts have carried the idea forward under several names. The “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine holds that government may not condition a benefit or licensed activity on the surrender of a constitutional right, established, fittingly, in a 1926 trucking case, and the Supreme Court has held that even the state-issued license plate is not a space the state may fully commandeer.²⁷ In Whalen v. Roe (1977), the Court upheld a prescription database but warned it was “not unaware of the threat to privacy implicit in the accumulation of vast amounts of personal information in computerized data banks”, language that has been doing quiet work in privacy law for fifty years.²⁸ The anonymity-and-association cases are stronger still: NAACP v. Alabama held that compelled disclosure of membership lists violates freedom of association because exposure chills participation; Talley and McIntyre protected anonymous pamphleteering as “an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent”; and in 2021 the Court reaffirmed that disclosure regimes chill association even without any misuse.²⁹ Add Papachristou (1972), where the Court described unmonitored, unaccounted-for movement (“wandering and strolling”) as among the amenities that “have dignified the right of dissent”; Kolender, striking down a demand-ID law; and Kent v. Dulles, calling the right to travel part of the liberty no citizen can be deprived of without due process.³⁰ The through-line: being catalogued (not just being punished) is itself the constitutional injury, because cataloguing chills freedom upstream of any abuse.

The honest caveat. No court has yet applied these doctrines to strike down an ALPR network, and courts upheld plate mandates and DMV databases for decades. The claim available to the public is not “courts have held this,” but something older and arguably stronger: the American constitutional tradition, from Otis through the anonymity cases to Carpenter and Chatrie,⁸ has consistently treated uncatalogued participation in public life as a precondition of self-government rather than a privilege the state may tax with surveillance, and the writs of assistance show that the founders condemned the standing capability itself, not merely its misuse. That is the liberty test, and it is why a system whose core feature is the permanent cataloguing of the innocent cannot pass it.

Notes / Sources

1. Chad Marlow & Jay Stanley, “Flock Safety Credibility Lost as it Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police Departments, and Public Across the Country,” ACLU, July 2, 2026 (ACLU of Massachusetts finding that one Oregon department entered “investigation” 111 times and “hehehe” 20 times in the search-reason field in September 2025). https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/flock-safety-credibility-lost-as-it-repeatedly-lies-to-city-councils-police-departments-and-public-across-the-country↩︎
2. ABC7 / City of Mountain View statements, “Mountain View officials allege federal, state agencies accessed Flock camera data without consent” (nationwide sharing setting enabled without the police department’s knowledge; 29 of 30 cameras reachable by outside agencies; the city called it “a system failure on Flock Safety’s part”). https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/mountain-view-officials-allege-federal-072733934.html↩︎
3. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “EFF’s Investigations Expose Flock Safety’s Surveillance Abuses: 2025 in Review,” Dec. 30, 2025 (complaint in EFF & ACLU of Northern California v. San Jose alleging 3,965,519 searches of San Jose’s plate database in one year). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-expose-flock-safetys-surveillance-abuses-2025-review↩︎
4. Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court Orders 1979–present (historical approval rates for government surveillance applications exceeding 99 percent). https://epic.org/foia/fisa/↩︎
5. Institute for Justice, “Police Have Reportedly Used License Plate Readers to Stalk Romantic Interests at Least 22 Times in Recent Years,” Apr. 27, 2026. https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/↩︎
6. 404 Media reporting (via syndication) that Flock reduced the detail included in its audit logs, limiting what future public-records releases can show. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/flock-threatens-website-hosting-license-214637275.html↩︎
7. Chad Marlow & Jay Stanley, “Municipalities: Beware of Changes in Flock’s Legal Terms if You’re Using or Considering License Plate Readers,” ACLU (analysis of the standard terms dated Feb. 16, 2026: removal of the sentence “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data”; grant to Flock of “the exclusive right to determine and control the method, timing, format, and medium” of the customer’s access to its own data). https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/flocks-terms-and-conditions↩︎
8. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); Chatrie v. United States, No. 25-112, 609 U.S. ___ (decided June 29, 2026); Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 2:24CV621, 2026 WL 207513 (E.D. Va. Jan. 27, 2026), on appeal, No. 26-1227 (4th Cir.).↩︎
9. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “The Human Toll of ALPR Errors,” Nov. 2, 2024 (settlements paid by cities: Aurora, Colo. — $1.9 million to Brittney Gilliam’s family; San Francisco — $495,000 to Denise Green; $49,500 to Brian Hofer). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/human-toll-alpr-errors↩︎
10. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR),” Street-Level Surveillance project (private ALPR fleets operated by Digital Recognition Network and Vigilant Solutions selling scans to lenders, insurers, repossession agents, and private investigators); ACLU, “You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements,” July 2013. https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr↩︎
11. ACLU of Northern California, documents obtained through public-records litigation showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a nationwide commercial license-plate database (Vigilant Solutions) by contract, reported March 2019. https://www.aclunc.org/blog/documents-reveal-ice-using-driver-location-data-local-police-mass-deportations↩︎
12. Reporting on the January 2025 breach of location-data broker Gravy Analytics, which exposed precise location data harvested from thousands of apps. See, e.g., TechCrunch, “Gravy Analytics data breach,” Jan. 2025.↩︎
13. Federal Trade Commission v. Kochava Inc. (D. Idaho, filed Aug. 2022) (FTC suit over the sale of precise location data revealing visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship, and shelters); FTC consent orders In re X-Mode Social/Outlogic (Jan. 2024) and In re InMarket Media (Jan. 2024), treating the sale of sensitive location data as an unfair practice under FTC Act § 5. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/08/ftc-sues-kochava-selling-data-tracks-people-reproductive-health-clinics-places-worship-other↩︎
14. Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, H.R. 4639, 118th Congress (passed the House of Representatives Apr. 17, 2024; not enacted). https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4639↩︎
15. Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2721–2725 (restricting disclosure of DMV records, subject to fourteen “permissible use” exceptions).↩︎
16. Y.-A. de Montjoye et al., “Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility,” Scientific Reports 3, 1376 (2013) (four spatio-temporal points uniquely identify 95% of individuals in a mobility dataset). https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376↩︎
17. Associated Press, “Top U.S. Catholic Church official resigns after cellphone data used to track him on Grindr and to gay bars,” July 2021 (public identification of an individual from commercially sold, nominally anonymized app location data).↩︎
18. 404 Media reporting on internal documents describing “Nova,” a Flock product linking plate data with commercial data-broker sources so police can “jump from LPR to person”; Brief of Amicus Curiae EPIC, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 26-1227 (4th Cir. Apr. 20, 2026). https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/EPIC-Amicus-Schmidt-v.-Norfolk.pdf↩︎
19. IPVM, “Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed,” June 2026 (Jerome County, Idaho sheriff ran his wife’s plate more than 700 times labeled “test”; Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley, May 2026 radio interview: “very rarely, someone does something stupid”). https://ipvm.com/reports/police-chiefs-track↩︎
20. Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011); Turner v. Driver, 848 F.3d 678 (5th Cir. 2017); Fields v. City of Philadelphia, 862 F.3d 353 (3d Cir. 2017) (First Amendment right to record public officials performing public duties in public places).↩︎
21. Galella v. Onassis, 487 F.2d 986 (2d Cir. 1973) (First Amendment provides no license for relentless individualized pursuit and surveillance of a person in public; injunction upheld).↩︎
22. 12News (KPNX Phoenix), “He threatened ‘war’ with Mark Brnovich’s office. Now he’s been convicted of cyberstalking,” Aug. 2022 (self-styled First Amendment auditor Chauncey Hollingberry pleaded guilty to federal cyberstalking after targeting a specific employee of the Arizona Attorney General’s office). https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/first-amendment-auditor-probation-stalking-harassing-mark-brnovich/75-df4d07e3-1718-4c4b-92fe-27113533ad3a↩︎
23. First Amendment Watch, “Controversial ‘First Amendment Auditors’ Test the Right to Film in Public Spaces” (collecting incidents, including a Goodyear, Ariz. auditor charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, and harassment after following a woman to her car; police noted the filming itself was not the crime). https://firstamendmentwatch.org/deep-dive/controversial-first-amendment-auditors-test-the-right-to-film-in-public-spaces/↩︎
24. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012) (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment) (“society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period”).↩︎
25. James Otis, argument against the writs of assistance, Boston, Feb. 1761 (“It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer”), as recorded in John Adams’ notes; John Adams to William Tudor, Mar. 29, 1817 (“Then and there the child Independence was born”); recounted in Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886).↩︎
26. On colonial “lantern laws” requiring enslaved people to carry lanterns after dark as a condition of moving through public space, see Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke Univ. Press 2015).↩︎
27. Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977); Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Comm’n of California, 271 U.S. 583 (1926) (unconstitutional-conditions doctrine).↩︎
28. Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589 (1977) (noting “the threat to privacy implicit in the accumulation of vast amounts of personal information in computerized data banks”).↩︎
29. NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958); Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960); McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U.S. 334 (1995); Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, 594 U.S. 595 (2021).↩︎
30. Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972); Kolender v. Lawson, 461 U.S. 352 (1983); Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958).↩︎

Jeff A. Pierson is the owner of Confidential Solutions LLC and a policy researcher. He writes on Idaho energy, land use, and technology policy at jeffapierson.substack.com.