Campaign Updates
Campaign updates and research on license plate surveillance in South Carolina.
S.447 cleared Senate Judiciary on April 9. Five floor amendments would close the gap between this bill and real ALPR regulation before the Senate vote.
SLED's plate surveillance database has no legislative authorization and no audit trail. A lawsuit and four bills are racing to decide its future.
Court filings show 430 million plate scans, a 35% error rate, and 2,000 users with no audit trail. A lawsuit wants to shut it down.
What Patent US11416545B1 Says About the Cameras on Your Roads
Flock Safety says their cameras don't identify race, gender, or ethnicity. Patent US11416545B1, granted in August 2022, describes a system that does exactly that. Every Flock camera in South Carolina is hardware that could run this software. No SC law prevents it.
Four bills to regulate license plate cameras are sitting in committee. One of them would void every Flock Safety contract in the state. Here's what H4675 does, where it falls short, and why it needs a hearing.
5 concrete steps any South Carolinian can take to push back against ALPR cameras: find what's in your area, file records requests, show up at council meetings, and support H4675.
How Greenville Built a Surveillance System Nobody Voted For
We filed a public records request for every Flock Safety contract the City of Greenville has signed since 2019. 96 pages came back. They show a surveillance program funded with seized money, signed by a police chief under investigation, and expanded for six years without a single council vote.
The Supreme Court said the government can't track your movements without a warrant. Then a private company built a system that lets them do it anyway.
South Carolina has no statute governing license plate cameras. No retention limits, no access controls, no penalties for misuse. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Why we built this site, what we're trying to do with it, and the problems we had to solve along the way.