Pre-Litigation Investigation — No complaint has been filed
This page gathers evidence for legal and public-interest review. It does not allege that every camera, data system, agency, or vendor is unlawful. Liability must be evaluated by defendant, jurisdiction, technology, purpose, search, disclosure, and documented injury.
Rights by default. Surveillance by exception.
A nationwide constitutional and public-interest investigation into government-enabled mass surveillance, corporate control of movement and identity data, and the people’s retained right to live, move, associate, worship, speak, and seek care without continuous suspicionless tracking.
The people should not have to repeatedly prove that they deserve privacy. Government and corporations seeking to collect, search, retain, combine, sell, or disclose personal movement and identity data should carry the burden of proving necessity, legality, accuracy, proportionality, security, and democratic authorization.
Neither a public agency nor its private contractor may lawfully acquire powers greater than those the people delegated to government.
Flock Safety is a prominent example because many public agencies use its license-plate-reader network. Naming a company or technology identifies an area for evidence collection; it is not a finding that every deployment or business practice is unlawful.
We are examining whether people were placed into persistent, searchable records simply because they drove, walked, worked, worshiped, protested, obtained medical care, attended school, or participated in lawful community life.
Government should not be able to purchase, request, or search privately collected location and identity data in circumstances where direct government collection would require judicial process, individualized suspicion, or public oversight.
A false plate read, outdated hotlist, incorrect identity match, unauthorized search, or uncontrolled data-sharing chain can lead to stops, searches, detention, retaliation, stalking, discrimination, or exposure of sensitive associations.
We are collecting contracts, retention rules, data-sharing lists, audit records, procurement documents, public-meeting records, accuracy reports, and policies showing who authorized the system and what safeguards were promised.
A single observation in public is not automatically equivalent to a searchable history of a person’s movements. Carpenter v. United States recognized that detailed historical location records can implicate a legitimate expectation of privacy even when a private company holds the data. Whether a particular ALPR or surveillance search is unconstitutional remains fact-specific and is not settled by this investigation in advance.
Surveillance that identifies visits to political meetings, protests, unions, places of worship, medical providers, attorneys, journalists, or advocacy groups may chill lawful activity. A viable claim requires evidence of governmental action and a concrete or credibly threatened injury.
Wrongful alerts, discriminatory deployment, secret watchlists, inaccessible correction procedures, and unequal enforcement may support due-process or equal-protection claims when the evidence and jurisdictional requirements are met.
The Ninth Amendment confirms that enumerating some rights does not deny or disparage others retained by the people. We treat it as an interpretive and popular-sovereignty principle supporting privacy, movement, autonomy, and freedom from continuous observation—not as a currently established standalone damages statute.
Constitutional claims ordinarily require governmental action. A private vendor is not automatically a constitutional defendant merely because it sells technology to police. Corporate liability may arise through joint action, delegated authority, statutory privacy duties, consumer-protection law, negligence, contract, disclosure, data-security, or other state-law theories depending on the facts.
Seeing one vehicle on one street is different from maintaining a retrospective database that can reveal where a person sleeps, works, worships, organizes, receives medical treatment, meets family, or travels over weeks or months. The constitutional question becomes more serious as surveillance grows in duration, precision, scale, searchability, sharing, and consequence.
California’s attorney general alleged in litigation filed against El Cajon that the city shared ALPR data with more than 100 out-of-state law-enforcement agencies despite state restrictions. The state explained that such records can reveal residences, workplaces, schools, medical providers, places of worship, and driving patterns. That litigation is one example of the accountability questions this national investigation will track.
A broad policy objection matters politically, but litigation usually requires standing and a concrete injury. The declaration form therefore separates personal harm, community evidence, public-record findings, and whistleblower information.
Submit a declaration if you experienced a wrongful surveillance-related encounter, discovered misuse or improper sharing, obtained public records, were chilled from lawful activity, or have firsthand professional or whistleblower knowledge. Preserve original records and metadata.
Submit a Privacy & Surveillance DeclarationThis investigation is not a law firm, does not create an attorney-client relationship, and does not stop any statute of limitations, administrative deadline, notice requirement, or records- preservation duty. People facing an active criminal, immigration, employment, family, or civil matter should seek qualified counsel promptly.