FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Indianapolis, IN — August 20, 2026 — Eyes Off Indiana today offered a respectful response to comments made by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita during an August 12 appearance on WIBC, in which he defended Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and stated: "When you're out in public, you don't have a right to privacy."

We have had constructive conversations with the Attorney General on this issue, and we appreciate his willingness to engage. He is right that the legal status of license plate reader networks is actively being litigated in courts around the country.

On the legal question itself, however, we respectfully disagree.

The idea that a person gives up all privacy the moment they step outside is not the rule in America, and the U.S. Supreme Court has said so directly. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court held that "[a] person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere," and that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy "in the whole of their physical movements." And just weeks ago, on June 29, the Court reaffirmed that principle in Chatrie v. United States, holding that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained a mere two hours of a person's cell-phone location data. The Court warned that unchecked government access to databases of people's movements amounts to "a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens' activities."

The Attorney General's analogy, that the public wouldn't object to a police officer standing on every corner, is understandable, but it is the very comparison the Supreme Court has rejected. An officer on a corner sees a moment and forgets it. A networked camera system photographs every passing car, keeps the records, and lets the government look backward through weeks of a person's travels with a few keystrokes. As the Court noted in Carpenter, quoting Justice Alito, society has never expected that the government could "secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual's car for a very long period." The question is not whether one snapshot on a public road is private. It is whether the government should be able to assemble all of those snapshots into a record of a person's life without any rules governing it.

"We appreciate the dialogue we've had with the Attorney General's office," said Walker Lasbury, President of Eyes Off Indiana. "But we believe the courts are heading in a different direction than 'no privacy in public,' and we'd rather Indiana get ahead of that now. We have never called for banning these cameras statewide. Whether to use them at all is a decision that belongs to local communities while the courts work through the legal questions. But in the meantime, the state should provide ground rules so that wherever these systems are used, they are used responsibly."

Indiana today has no statewide law governing how law enforcement ALPR data is handled. Eyes Off Indiana urges the General Assembly to set three basic ground rules: a seven-day retention limit for non-hit data, a ban on commercial sharing and selling of plate data, and robust transparency and audit requirements. These are a floor, not a ceiling, and communities would remain free to go further or opt out entirely.

We look forward to continuing the conversation with the Attorney General's office.

About Eyes Off Indiana

Eyes Off Indiana is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to establish statewide minimum safeguards on automatic license plate reader use in Indiana: a floor, not a ceiling. Learn more at eyesoffindiana.org.

Media Contact

Walker Lasbury, President
walker@eyesoffindiana.org