The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is taking a stand against what it calls a “digital dragnet” in Norfolk, Virginia. On April 20, 2026, the group filed a formal legal brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, aiming to shut down a citywide surveillance system they say tracks drivers without any hint of a crime.
At the heart of the fight is Norfolk’s network of 176 automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras. These high-tech eyes capture the movements of every car passing through the city, feeding time and date-stamped data into a database that can be searched for weeks—and sometimes held onto indefinitely.
The NCLA argues this isn’t just efficient policing; they say it’s a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.
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The case, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, reached the appeals court after a lower district court ruled in favor of the city. That court essentially decided that the surveillance didn’t cross a line because the data was captured in public. However, the NCLA claims the district court totally missed the mark on a landmark 2018 Supreme Court ruling, Carpenter v. United States.
In that decision, the nation’s highest court ruled that people have a legitimate expectation of privacy regarding the “whole of their physical movements.”
The NCLA argues that by stitching together thousands of license plate scans, Norfolk can reconstruct the intimate details of a person’s life—where they work, where they pray, and who they visit—all without a warrant or even a specific reason to suspect the driver of a crime.
“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,” said Andreia Trifoi, a staff attorney for the NCLA. “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.”
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The legal group is also pushing back against the idea that local laws or the “usefulness” of the tech makes it okay. They argue that even if these cameras help catch criminals, the Constitution doesn’t allow the government to monitor every innocent person just in case they might find something.
They compared the practice to the “general warrants” used by the British before the American Revolution—broad searches that let officials rummage through anyone’s business without specific evidence.
As the case moves forward in the Fourth Circuit, the court will have to decide if a city’s desire for high-tech safety tools outweighs a citizen’s right to move through their community without being logged into a government database. The NCLA is asking the court to reverse the previous ruling and put strict guardrails on how—and if—this kind of massive tracking can continue.
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