Strict warrants required always
The question before us is not whether license plate readers serve a legitimate public safety purpose — they may well do so — but whether law enforcement may assemble, without judicial authorization, a comprehensive record of where every citizen travels, when, and how often. The Fourth Amendment was drafted precisely to prohibit general warrants: those open-ended instruments of search that require no particular suspicion and answer to no magistrate. A network of cameras that silently logs the movements of an entire population is, in structural effect, a general warrant executed in perpetuity. That the surveillance is automated rather than manual does not diminish its reach; it enlarges it enormously. The remedy the Constitution provides is clear: a neutral magistrate must find probable cause before the executive arm of government may assemble a dossier on a private citizen's movements. Broad administrative discretion, unchecked by the bench, is precisely the arrangement the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid.
Executive discretion enables order
Let me be direct about where my principles lead me, even against the position I have been assigned. An energetic executive I have always championed — but energetic within law, not above it. A surveillance network that tracks the movements of citizens without judicial authorization is not executive vigor; it is executive excess, the very tyranny we built this Constitution to prevent. The commerce power is broad; the police power is not unlimited. When documented cases show officers using these plate-reader networks to follow individuals without warrant or cause, the check has failed. The proper answer is not to abolish the tool — a well-governed network that solves violent crimes serves the public interest — but to subject it to precisely the legislative oversight now being demanded. Require warrants for targeted tracking, mandate data retention limits, and compel regular legislative audit. Order built on unchecked surveillance is not order. It is the architecture of a police state, and I will not call it otherwise.
Surveillance networks threaten liberty
The question is not whether a government may watch a public road — it may — but whether a government may compile, store, and search a continuous record of every citizen's movement without any judicial check whatsoever, and on that question I have no hesitation. A constable who follows a man through the streets must eventually tire and go home; a network of cameras never tires, never forgets, and can reconstruct months of travel in seconds. That capacity, multiplied across an entire city and shared among agencies without a warrant, is not a modest police tool — it is the architecture of a surveillance state dressed in the language of convenience. Documented misuse by officers tracking private individuals without judicial authorization is not an anomaly; it is precisely what concentrated, unsupervised power always produces. The remedy is plain: no warrantless use, strict legislative limits on retention, and full public accounting. Liberty does not negotiate with creeping encroachment — it insists on a wall.