Washington, D.C., April 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed an amicus curiae brief today in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. NCLA urges the Court to place guardrails on Norfolk, Virginia’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system that tracks the movements of everyone who drives through the city and stores all that data—potentially indefinitely—in a searchable database. This system defies the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. By misinterpreting the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling, the district court in the case wrongly upheld Norfolk’s ALPR regime. NCLA asks the Fourth Circuit to reverse that error.
Carpenter ruled that people have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements over time, noting that an individual “does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection” by going out in public. That decision further held that the government violates those legitimate expectations of privacy when it uses advanced technology to make a comprehensive record of a person’s physical movements, potentially revealing the privacies of life—information that used to be beyond government’s grasp.
Like many courts have done since Carpenter, the district court below disregarded Carpenter’s framework, concluding that Norfolk’s ALPR program does not violate Americans’ reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their movements. But Norfolk’s ALPR scheme indiscriminately collects and stores time and date-stamped information on all drivers in a vast database, which enables the city to reconstruct its residents’ daily movements, habits, and patterns—information that allows deductions as to the “privacies of life.” ALPR schemes that track the movements of every innocent motorist like this one, and the one NCLA is fighting in its Schemel v. City of Marco Island, Florida lawsuit in the Eleventh Circuit, represent precisely the kind of “too permeating police surveillance” that the Fourth Amendment was designed to stop.
NCLA released the following statements:
“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.”
— Andreia Trifoi, Staff Attorney, 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.”
— Mark Chenoweth, President and Chief Legal Officer, NCLA
For more information visit the amicus page here.
ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal
