(Citizens for a New Louisiana) — In February 2025, a federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia, issued a ruling that is expected to send shockwaves across the country. At issue were the city’s 172 automatic license plate reader (LPR) cameras, mounted on poles and police cars throughout the community. These cameras scan every passing vehicle—not just suspects, but everyone. They record the license plate number, location, date, and time. This information is stored in searchable databases. Police (and others) can access them without a warrant. Why is this important? Because it represents serious concerns for our rights, and it isn’t confined to Norfolk. It is happening in countless parishes and municipalities right here in Louisiana.

Norfolk’s Warning

Two Norfolk residents have sued the city, arguing that the spy network amounts to unconstitutional surveillance: a dragnet that reveals the “whole of a person’s movements.” This is something the U.S. Supreme Court has warned about in recent rulings. Norfolk officials countered that the cameras were simply a modern policing tool. But Chief Judge Mark S. Davis refused to dismiss the case, allowing it to proceed. His reasoning was simple: pervasive surveillance of every driver looks far more like a warrantless search than traditional observation, and that raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns.

This legal fight is not confined to Virginia. The same systems are spreading across America, including Louisiana. Local councils and sheriffs, often under the radar, are signing contracts with private vendors such as Flock Safety and Louisiana Crime Fighters. Once installed, the cameras function exactly as they do in Norfolk: silently, constantly, and indiscriminately logging the lives of law-abiding people. If Norfolk is a warning, Louisiana may be the next front line.

The Dragnet in Action

Unlike a speed camera that snaps a photo only when someone breaks the law, license plate readers capture every plate, every time. Each scan is bundled with GPS coordinates, creating a log of where each vehicle has traveled. Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of cameras, and police can reconstruct a person’s movements. They can trace them weeks or even months into the past. Recently, Reason reported that one vendor boasts that its technology can scan 2,000 plates per minute, essentially ensuring no car escapes notice. Civil liberties advocates warn that this is not targeted policing. Instead, they call it the very definition of mass surveillance.

Errors are often common as well. In Colorado, a mother named Brittney Gilliam and four children were forced face-down at gunpoint after a LPR misread her plate. Data-sharing is also rampant. In California, sheriffs sent license plate data to other states in contradiction of California law, while in Illinois, records suggested federal agencies have gained access to local LPR feeds.

The Dragnet Here in Louisiana

Louisiana is not immune to these problems. In Jefferson Parish, a Georgia man, Randal Reid, was arrested in 2022 and jailed for nearly a week due to a misidentification by facial recognition software. Deputies had used Clearview AI to generate a match and issued warrants, despite no corroborating evidence. Reid had never set foot in Louisiana. He was held for six days before the warrants were rescinded. In 2025, he reached a $200,000 settlement with Jefferson Parish officials. His case demonstrates that actual risks are posed by dragnet surveillance.

The lessons are clear: once surveillance networks exist, they are almost impossible to contain. They will make errors. They will be misused. And ordinary people will pay the price.

From Patriot Act to Parish Councils

The Norfolk case did not come out of nowhere. The roots of the surveillance state stretch back to 2001, when Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act after the September 11 attacks. As Chronicles Magazine observed on the 20th anniversary, the law marked a turning point: protections against warrantless surveillance were eroded in the name of national security, and both Republicans and Democrats largely went along. What began as federal intelligence-gathering has trickled down over two decades into local policing.

Subsequent Supreme Court rulings show the judiciary struggling with the new reality. In United States v. Knotts (1983), the Court held that police could track a single vehicle using a beeper without violating the individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy. But in United States v. Jones (2012), it recognized that attaching a GPS device to track a vehicle for 28 days crossed a constitutional line. And in Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court declared that collecting 127 days of cell-site location data without a warrant was unconstitutional, because it revealed the “whole of a person’s movements.” Yet the constitutional provisions haven’t changed in over two hundred years.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

These cases illustrate new inventions of the federal judiciary in its efforts to support and protect the status quo. They have very little to do with the original intent and meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

Peeping Toms in Everyone’s Backyard

The Institute for Justice warns that LPRs and biometric cameras create an atmosphere where “everyone knows they are being watched and tracked whenever they hit the road.” We outlined this a few years ago in “Peeping Toms in Your Local Government.”

Local officials often justify these systems as tools to deter crime, but unlike targeted red-light cameras, they indiscriminately record everyone. Residents of towns like Youngsville, Carencro, or Broussard may think such technologies are reserved for big cities, but the contracts are spreading fast—and often with little or no public scrutiny. In fact, Carencro recently received grant money to fund the placement of additional cameras to deter littering. There isn’t a single reasonable person who believes the use of these cameras will be limited to littering. And as we will discuss later, our legislature has failed to take steps to ensure basic auditing and monitoring of these systems from abuse.

Jefferson Parish is the cautionary tale of how these systems also breed laziness in policing. When Clearview AI misidentified Reid, parish deputies did not verify the claim. They trusted the algorithm more than basic investigative work. The result: a man sat in jail for nearly a week on charges tied to a state he had never visited. The parish’s $200,000 settlement should be read as an admission that these systems are deeply flawed. Yet contracts for more surveillance continue to move forward across the state.

Taxpayer Dollars and Foreign Espionage

There is also a national security dimension. As we documented in Louisiana Tax Dollars Funding Chinese Espionage, many surveillance contracts in Louisiana involve equipment sourced from companies with ties to China. Although contrary to Louisiana law, we continue to find examples just about everywhere we look.

The result is perverse: sheriffs, parish councils, and municipal entities in Louisiana could be purchasing equipment that doubles as a potential intelligence pipeline for foreign adversaries. In a state with strategic oil, gas, and military assets, the implications are sobering. One branch of government tells residents these systems “keep them safe,” while another warns the same systems may feed adversarial espionage.

The result is a paradox. Louisiana taxpayers may be paying many times. Once to install surveillance systems that erode their own privacy, and again by exposing themselves to the misuse of the very data those systems generate by foreign or federal entities. Then the cost of the systems is borne on the back of taxpayers, as well as those settlement payouts which occur when these systems or the people using them fail to act responsibly.

How the Dragnet Expands

Surveillance systems rarely stay confined. Once cameras, software, and databases are in place, the temptation to share and repurpose them grows. The Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) has documented how federal and local surveillance quietly merge through fusion centers, entities designed to funnel local police data into broader federal intelligence networks.

Consider geofence warrants—a tool in which police demand data from tech companies about every phone or device within a specific area at a given time. Initially justified as a way to solve violent crimes, geofence requests have since been used against protesters, churches, and ordinary citizens. One TAC report warned bluntly: “First, they spied on protesters. Then churches. You’re next.”

At the national level, TAC has also revealed that the White House itself has overseen surveillance programs that operated outside statutory limits, demonstrating that executive agencies feel free to break or bend the law when technology permits. Our federal government disregards its own rules. How, then, can citizens in Jefferson Parish or Lafayette reasonably expect parish sheriffs and municipalities to resist misusing dragnet data once they have it?

Further, the Jefferson Parish misidentification case shows that dragnet surveillance does not require malice to cause harm. However, when paired with fusion centers, geofence warrants, impunity, and immunity, the risks multiply: errors, abuse, and overreach are not bugs, but features of the surveillance state.

Louisiana’s Structural Vulnerability

Louisiana’s exposure to surveillance is not limited to the technology itself, but also to the absence of statutory safeguards. State law includes almost no requirements for transparency or independent oversight. Local agencies can adopt surveillance systems without audits or reviews. Unlike other regulated law enforcement activities—such as evidence handling, procurement protocols, and access controls for driver’s licenses and criminal history data—there are no mandatory checks to ensure that LPR or facial recognition programs are used lawfully and responsibly.

We have to look no further than Lafayette to find a recent case where abuse has occurred. In one example, a person with access to law enforcement surveillance technology and equipment allowed a private citizen to use their log-in credentials, essentially giving this person unfettered access to the surveillance apparatus. Of course, steps were taken to ensure the public would likely never find out about it.

There are no provisions requiring public reporting. That means no one tracks how often the systems are accessed, how long data is retained, or which agencies are allowed to share it. There are no routine audit mandates that would allow an outside entity to test compliance. Nor are there automatic sunset clauses that force legislatures to revisit and reauthorize surveillance powers. In effect, once a parish or municipality installs a network of cameras, the system operates indefinitely on the assumption of trust.

This lack of oversight is what makes Louisiana structurally vulnerable. It allows small procurement decisions, sometimes with no public comment or oversight, to create vast new surveillance capacities with minimal legal constraint. Every camera added in Louisiana expands the reach of the surveillance network. That data becomes accessible to other jurisdictions. Without statutory guardrails, abuses, such as unauthorized access and unauthorized data-sharing, will continue to occur unchecked.

Paths of Resistance

Across the country, towns have already canceled Flock Safety contracts after residents pushed back. The Institute for Justice’s Plate Privacy Project is equipping communities with model legislation, legal support, and data about how LPR systems are used. The Tenth Amendment Center offers another path: noncooperation at the local level. Through a refusal to sign data-sharing agreements with fusion centers or federal agencies, states and parishes can deprive the surveillance state of oxygen.

Utah’s recent legislation provides a model: step-by-step laws that gradually build firewalls around local data and keep it out of federal hands. Louisiana lawmakers—if pressed by citizens—can adapt those principles here.

Ultimately, the most powerful resistance comes not only from policy but also from culture. Louisianans must reclaim the expectation that their movements, associations, and lives belong to them—not to data centers, and not to governments that view every resident as a potential suspect.

Drawing the Line

Twenty years ago, America stumbled into a surveillance state under the shadow of 9/11. The Patriot Act opened the door. Norfolk’s cameras show how far the system has evolved. Jefferson Parish’s wrongful arrest proves the danger is real. And Sheriffs, parishes, and municipalities across Louisiana are being courted to join a national dragnet one contract at a time.

The dragnet state threatens to replace local trust with suspicion, and personal freedom with permanent monitoring. Louisiana now faces a choice: to continue funding a dragnet that erodes privacy, feeds foreign intelligence risks, and chills the freedom of ordinary life, or to reclaim the principles of limited government, accountability, and liberty. If Norfolk citizens can challenge 172 cameras in court, Louisiana citizens can challenge their Sheriffs and governing authorities of their parishes and municipalities who are willing to sell out their freedom.

The question is not whether the surveillance state will grow—it already has. The question is whether Louisiana will continue feeding it, or whether citizens will draw a line. For if government “sees you when you’re sleeping,” then freedom itself may not wake.