US Police License Plate Readers are Latest Fear in Post-Roe Abortion Surveillance Tech

After the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion in June, numerous US states began banning or restricting abortion access. With pregnant people fleeing across state lines to end their unwanted pregnancies, various surveillance methods have come under increased scrutiny for fear they could out abortion recipients.

The latest worry is over license plate readers used by US police departments. The technology is often attached to police cruisers and automatically scans the license plates of cars that it passes on the highway, roads, or even parking spaces, and looks them up in a computer database for arrest warrants and other items of legal interest to police. They can also be installed on street lights, highway overpasses, or other vantage points near roads.

Chris Gilliard, a tech fellow at Social Science Research Council, told The Guardian on Thursday that such technology could be used to "criminalize people seeking reproductive health and further erode people’s ability to move about their daily lives free from being tracked and traced.”

One company that makes plate reader tech for police departments, Flock, boasts that its goal is nothing less than to “eliminate crime.”

“Our position at Flock remains consistent in response to the Dobbs decision. Our perspective is that we do not enact laws, and our mission is not specific to any particular laws,” the company told the Guardian, referring to the Dobbs vs. Jackson case in which the US Supreme Court struck down longstanding abortion rights across the US.

The technology isn’t new, but it has greatly proliferated in recent years amid concerns about the threats posed by terrorism or simply spikes in crime.

“It gives us basically another set of eyes in the area,” Kevin Olmstead, the interim deputy chief of operations for the Champaign Police Department in Illinois, told Illinois Public Radio earlier this week. “It's sort of a witness that we can go to and look at for information as far as the vehicles that are going through an area at a particular time that a crime occurs.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has warned about the dangers of such massive surveillance and pressed for strengthening US privacy laws “to prevent the government from tracking our movements on a massive scale.”

Nashville, Tennessee, notably took action last month to ban the use of license plate readers in enforcing the state’s absolute ban on abortions that took effect in late August. However, the state has not yet criminalized Tennesseans traveling to other states for abortions.

It’s not clear that such a law would be constitutional, either. In his concurring opinion to the Dobbs decision, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that traveling to another state to get an abortion would be protected by the constitutional right to interstate travel.

Other tech that activists fear could be “ratting out” abortion seekers from states with abortion bans is period tracking apps commonly used by people to track their monthly uterine cycles, and search engines that could report certain searches if they are judged to be aimed at breaking local laws.