“I agree with FDOT’s decision to revoke every permit for automated license plate readers on state roads. A license plate reader doesn’t only see the people law enforcement is looking for. It photographs, timestamps, and stores the movements of everyone who drives past it: your commute, your church, your doctor’s office, your kid’s school. That is a permanent record of ordinary people’s lives, built without a warrant, without a public vote, and in most cases without residents ever being told the cameras were there at all.
I don’t doubt these cameras have helped solve serious crimes. Sheriffs across the state have said so, and I take them at their word. But ‘it works’ has never been the standard we apply to government surveillance. The question is whether it works within limits the public actually agreed to, and on that question, Florida fell short.
Pulling the state road permits is the right call but it is also incomplete. Most of the license plate readers in Central Florida were never on state roads to begin with; they’re on city streets and county roads, at HOA entrances, apartment complexes, and shopping center parking lots. Today’s order doesn’t touch a single one of them.
Today I am asking every local government in Central Florida to do what the state just did: pause new license plate reader contracts and publish a full public accounting of what’s already deployed. How many cameras are there? Who can search the database? How long is the data kept, and who is it shared with — including agencies outside Florida? Residents are entitled to those answers before another camera goes up.
Public safety and privacy are not opposing teams. We can protect our neighbors without building a surveillance network nobody voted for.”