A pair of Cook County residents are suing the Illinois State Police, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul over the state’s use of automated license plate readers like this one, alleging they amount to “dragnet surveillance.” Similar devices are installed across the suburbs.
Courtesy of Flock Safety

A lawsuit accuses Illinois State Police and state officials of operating an unconstitutional “system of dragnet surveillance” through license plate-reading cameras that track motorist’s whereabouts.

The federal suit, filed last week by Cook County residents Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz, names the state police, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul as defendants.

“Defendants are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County — or to school, or a grocery store, or a doctor’s office, or a pharmacy, or a political rally, or a romantic encounter, or family gathering — every day, without any reason to suspect anyone of anything, and are holding onto those whereabouts just in case they decide in the future that some citizen might be an appropriate target of law enforcement,” the suit alleges.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, “challenges the warrantless, suspicion-less, and entirely unreasonable” tracking as a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments.

The cameras — known as automated license plate readers — are described by many in law enforcement as essential in their work, and they have been proliferating over the last decade. The devices use software to scan the license plates of every passing car, recording the date, time, GPS coordinates and even pictures.

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