A lawsuit accuses the Illinois State Police and state officials of operating an unconstitutional “surveillance system” through license plate reading cameras that track the whereabouts of motorists.
The lawsuit, filed last week by Cook County residents Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz, names the state police, Gov. JB Pritzker and the attorney. General Kwame Raoul as accused.
“The defendants are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County – or to school, or to a grocery store, or to a doctor’s office, or to a pharmacy, or to a political rally, or to a romantic encounter, or to a family gathering – every day, without any “There is reason to suspect someone of something and hold on to that whereabouts in case they decide in the future that any citizen might be an appropriate target for authorities,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, “challenges warrantless, suspicionless, and completely unreasonable surveillance” as a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The cameras, known as automatic license plate readers, are described by many law enforcement officers as essential to their work, and have proliferated over the past decade. The devices use software to scan the license plates of every passing car, recording the date, time, GPS coordinates and even photographs.
In 2021, the Illinois State Police received more than $12 million in grants to expand its network of high-definition surveillance cameras after an increase in highway shootings.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times Archive
Most of the country’s large police departments now use them. Automated license plate readers in Chicago record 200 million license plates a year, providing police with a detailed pattern of drivers’ daily habits and offering real-time alerts on vehicles wanted in crimes.
In 2021, the Illinois State Police received more than $12 million in grants to expand its network of high-definition surveillance cameras after an increase in highway shootings.
The grant came a year after Pritzker signed the Tamara Clayton Highway Camera Act, which required the state to install new cameras on highways. The law is named after a postal worker who was shot and killed as she headed to work on Interstate 57 in 2019.
Hundreds of cameras have been installed in Cook County since that law was signed, the lawsuit claims.
According to the lawsuit, images taken by ISP cameras are stored on the Motorola Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network for 90 days, but that retention limit can be changed at any time.
“Therefore, Defendants could extend the retention of such data indefinitely at their discretion,” the lawsuit states. “The ISP is tracking the movements of millions of citizens, including the plaintiffs, and is simply retaining that mass surveillance data in case one day some police officer decides to single out the plaintiffs for a specific investigation, whether warranted or not.
Information about drivers is collected without a warrant or suspicion, the lawsuit alleges. “ISPs don’t even have unreasonable suspicions: they have no suspicions at all. Rather, they collect all the public movements of every car they can in Illinois and every car they can across the country.”
State police, Raoul and Pritzker’s offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit seeks an order prohibiting the state from operating its current network of license plate readers and from installing additional cameras.
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