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The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed an amicus curiae brief on April 20, 2026, in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. NCLA is urging the court to impose guardrails on Norfolk, Virginia’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system, which it says tracks the movements of everyone who drives through the city and stores the resulting data—potentially indefinitely—in a searchable database.
NCLA argues that Norfolk’s ALPR program violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. The brief contends that the district court in the case misapplied the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States when it upheld Norfolk’s ALPR regime.
NCLA points to Carpenter, which held that individuals have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements over time. The Supreme Court stated that a person “does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection” by going out in public.
According to NCLA, Carpenter further concluded that the government violates those expectations when it uses advanced technology to create a comprehensive record of a person’s physical movements—information that may reveal “the privacies of life” and was previously beyond government reach.
NCLA says the district court disregarded Carpenter’s framework by concluding that Norfolk’s ALPR program does not violate reasonable expectations of privacy in the whole of a person’s movements.
The brief argues that Norfolk’s ALPR scheme collects and stores time- and date-stamped information on all drivers in a large database. NCLA says this enables the city to reconstruct residents’ daily movements, habits, and patterns, and to draw deductions about the “privacies of life.”
NCLA characterizes ALPR systems that track the movements of every motorist—without individualized suspicion—as “too permeating police surveillance,” which it says the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
NCLA also notes that similar ALPR tracking practices are at issue in its Schemel v. City of Marco Island lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Andreia Trifoi, Staff Attorney, NCLA: “The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision is clear: the government violates people’s privacy when it uses advanced technology to pervasively monitor and record their movements over time. By allowing Norfolk to do precisely that without a warrant, suspicion, or probable cause, the district court ignored Carpenter’s command and handed the city a license to invade its residents’ privacy.”
Mark Chenoweth, President and Chief Legal Officer, NCLA: “Police can use ALPRs to check license plates in real time against existing databases of suspicious activity, such as stolen plates. But police cannot use ALPRs to collect and store data about every suspicion-less passing car in a giant database, in case something happens later they want to investigate. Such a data dragnet is an illegal search.”
NCLA asks the Fourth Circuit to reverse the district court’s decision, arguing that Norfolk’s ALPR program should be constrained under the principles established in Carpenter.
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