At 8:22 am on December 4 last year, a car traveling down a small residential road in Alabama used its license-plate-reading cameras to take photos of vehicles it passed. One image, which does not contain a vehicle or a license plate, shows a bright red “Trump” campaign sign placed in front of someone’s garage. In the background is a banner referencing Israel, a holly wreath, and a festive inflatable snowman.
Another image taken on a different day by a different vehicle shows a “Steelworkers for Harris-Walz” sign stuck in the lawn in front of someone’s home. A construction worker, with his face unblurred, is pictured near another Harris sign. Other photos show Trump and Biden (including “Fuck Biden”) bumper stickers on the back of trucks and cars across America. One photo, taken in November 2023, shows a partially torn bumper sticker supporting the Obama-Biden lineup.
These images were generated by AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, initially designed to capture license plates, but which are now photographing political lawn signs outside private homes, individuals wearing T-shirts with text, and vehicles displaying pro-abortion bumper stickers—all while recording the precise locations of these observations. Newly obtained data reviewed by WIRED shows how a tool originally intended for traffic enforcement has evolved into a system capable of monitoring speech protected by the US Constitution.
The detailed photographs all surfaced in search results produced by the systems of DRN Data, a license-plate-recognition (LPR) company owned by Motorola Solutions. The LPR system can be used by private investigators, repossession agents, and insurance companies; a related Motorola business, called Vigilant, gives cops access to the same LPR data.
However, files shared with WIRED by artist Julia Weist, who is documenting restricted datasets as part of her work, show how those with access to the LPR system can search for common phrases or names, such as those of politicians, and be served with photographs where the search term is present, even if it is not displayed on license plates.
A search result for the license plates from Delaware vehicles with the text “Trump” returned more than 150 images showing people’s homes and bumper stickers. Each search result includes the date, time, and exact location of where a photograph was taken.
“I searched for the word ‘believe,’ and that is all lawn signs. There’s things just painted on planters on the side of the road, and then someone wearing a sweatshirt that says ‘Believe.’” Weist says. “I did a search for the word ‘lost,’ and it found the flyers that people put up for lost dogs and cats.”
Beyond highlighting the far-reaching nature of LPR technology, which has collected billions of images of license plates, the research also shows how people’s personal political views and their homes can be recorded into vast databases that can be queried.
“It really reveals the extent to which surveillance is happening on a mass scale in the quiet streets of America,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That surveillance is not limited just to license plates, but also to a lot of other potentially very revealing information about people.”
DRN, in a statement issued to WIRED, said it complies with “all applicable laws and regulations.”
Billions of Photos
License-plate-recognition systems, broadly, work by first capturing an image of a vehicle; then they use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to identify and extract the text from the vehicle's license plate within the captured image. Motorola-owned DRN sells multiple license-plate-recognition cameras: a fixed camera that can be placed near roads, identify a vehicle’s make and model, and capture images of vehicles traveling up to 150 mph; a “quick deploy” camera that can be attached to buildings and monitor vehicles at properties; and mobile cameras that can be placed on dashboards or be mounted to vehicles and capture images when they are driven around.
Over more than a decade, DRN has amassed more than 15 billion “vehicle sightings” across the United States, and it claims in its marketing materials that it amasses more than 250 million sightings per month. Images in DRN’s commercial database are shared with police using its Vigilant system, but images captured by law enforcement are not shared back into the wider database.
The system is partly fueled by DRN “affiliates” who install cameras in their vehicles, such as repossession trucks, and capture license plates as they drive around. Each vehicle can have up to four cameras attached to it, capturing images in all angles. These affiliates earn monthly bonuses and can also receive free cameras and search credits.
In 2022, Weist became a certified private investigator in New York State. In doing so, she unlocked the ability to access the vast array of surveillance software accessible to PIs. Weist could access DRN’s analytics system, DRNsights, as part of a package through investigations company IRBsearch. (After Weist published an op-ed detailing her work, IRBsearch conducted an audit of her account and discontinued it. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
“There is a difference between tools that are publicly accessible, like Google Street View, and things that are searchable,” Weist says. While conducting her work, Weist ran multiple searches for words and popular terms, which found results far beyond license plates. In data she shared with WIRED, a search for “Planned Parenthood,” for instance, returned stickers on cars, on bumpers, and in windows, both for and against the reproductive health services organization. Civil liberties groups have already raised concerns about how license-plate-reader data could be weaponized against those seeking abortion.
Weist says she is concerned with how the search tools could be misused when there is increasing political violence and divisiveness in society. While not linked to license plate data, one law enforcement official in Ohio recently said people should “write down” the addresses of people who display yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, exemplifying how a searchable database of citizens’ political affiliations could be abused.
A 2016 report by the Associated Press revealed widespread misuse of confidential law enforcement databases by police officers nationwide. In 2022, WIRED revealed that hundreds of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and contractors were investigated for abusing similar databases, including LPR systems. The alleged misconduct in both reports ranged from stalking and harassment to sharing information with criminals.
While people place signs in their lawns or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially to influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it is intended for “human-scale visibility,” not that of machines. “Perhaps they want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don't necessarily want to be logged into a nationwide database that’s accessible to police authorities,” Stanley says.
Weist says the system, at the very least, should be able to filter out images that do not contain license plate data and not make mistakes. “Any number of times is too many times, especially when it's finding stuff like what people are wearing or lawn signs,” Weist says.
“License plate recognition (LPR) technology supports public safety and community services, from helping to find abducted children and stolen vehicles to automating toll collection and lowering insurance premiums by mitigating insurance fraud,” Jeremiah Wheeler, the president of DRN, says in a statement.
Weist believes that, given the relatively small number of images showing bumper stickers compared to the large number of vehicles with them, Motorola Solutions may be attempting to filter out images containing bumper stickers or other text.
Wheeler did not respond to WIRED's questions about whether there are limits on what can be searched in license plate databases, why images of homes with lawn signs but no vehicles in sight appeared in search results, or if filters are used to reduce such images.
“DRNsights complies with all applicable laws and regulations,” Wheeler says. “The DRNsights tool allows authorized parties to access license plate information and associated vehicle information that is captured in public locations and visible to all. Access is restricted to customers with certain permissible purposes under the law, and those in breach have their access revoked.”
AI Everywhere
License-plate-recognition systems have flourished in recent years as cameras have become smaller and machine-learning algorithms have improved. These systems, such as DRN and rival Flock, mark part of a change in the way people are surveilled as they move around cities and neighborhoods.
Increasingly, CCTV cameras are being equipped with AI to monitor people’s movements and even detect their emotions. The systems have the potential to alert officials, who may not be able to constantly monitor CCTV footage, to real-world events. However, whether license plate recognition can reduce crime has been questioned.
“When government or private companies promote license plate readers, they make it sound like the technology is only looking for lawbreakers or people suspected of stealing a car or involved in an amber alert, but that’s just not how the technology works,” says Dave Maass, the director of investigations at civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The technology collects everyone's data and stores that data often for immense periods of time.”
Over time, the technology may become more capable, too. Maass, who has long researched license-plate-recognition systems, says companies are now trying to do “vehicle fingerprinting,” where they determine the make, model, and year of the vehicle based on its shape and also determine if there’s damage to the vehicle. DRN’s product pages say one upcoming update will allow insurance companies to see if a car is being used for ride-sharing.
“The way that the country is set up was to protect citizens from government overreach, but there’s not a lot put in place to protect us from private actors who are engaged in business meant to make money,” Nicole McConlogue, an associate professor of law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who has researched license-plate-surveillance systems and their potential for discrimination.
“The volume that they’re able to do this in is what makes it really troubling,” McConlogue says of vehicles moving around streets collecting images. “When you do that, you're carrying the incentives of the people that are collecting the data. But also, in the United States, you’re carrying with it the legacy of segregation and redlining, because that left a mark on the composition of neighborhoods.”
