There is no reasonable expectation of privacy from a government license plate reader collecting information on the movements of one’s car. It can’t be compared to GPS tracking, and it’s not an electronic trespass. United States v. Yang, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11967 (D. Nev. Jan. 25, 2018):
The Defendant argues in this case that law enforcement engaged in an unconstitutional search of Yang because it “used invasive vehicle location tracking technology to discover the GMC Yukon.” The Defendant further argues that the government “used advanced tracking technology to pinpoint the location of the Yukon down to the longitude and latitude coordinates at a specific date and time.” The Court rejects the Defendant’s argument, because the Court finds that the government did not use ‘invasive vehicle location tracking technology’ without a warrant to engage in a “search” of the Yang’s private property or the curtilage of his home or residence.
First, the Court notes and reiterates the following factual findings. The observations of license plate locations noted in the LEARN database do not rely upon invasive technology allowing law enforcement officers to essentially peer into the private property of individuals. The LEARN database relies upon random observations of license plates by digital cameras placed on tow trucks or other vehicles for repossession companies and on some law enforcement vehicles. The digital cameras capture images of license plates when the vehicle with a mounted camera drives past or near another vehicle with a license plate. The program is not designed to and does not track an individual’s movements or an individual automobile’s movements continuously or even regularly. The program does not permit a law enforcement client to direct that a vehicle with a LEARN digital camera follow and continuously record the location of a particular automobile. The LEARN database can but does not regularly provide contemporaneous location information.
Second, the Court finds that the technology associated with the digital camera for LEARN does not permit advanced or invasive surveillance of individuals or individual automobiles. The LEARN digital cameras do not have the capability of capturing images through solid barriers such as walls erected to protect the privacy of personal property or individual movements. The technology does not have the capability of taking photos of license plates from a significant distance — that is beyond two to three standard lanes of a street. The cameras cannot be readily or easily manipulated while the vehicle upon which the camera is mounted is moving.
Third, there is no evidence in this case to suggest that law enforcement officers used the LEARN database to regularly or continuously monitor the movements of Yang or the GMC Yukon or the Budget Truck. Inspector Steele submitted only one request for a detection report from the LEARN database. The report identified a possible matching license plate and a street block where that plate had last been identified. The report was requested from LEARN on April 13, 2016 and the only reported observation was from April 5, 2016. This to say that the LEARN report did not provide and does not collect any information about where the license plate had been over the previous week or two weeks. It simply provided a block location for an observation from approximately eight days earlier. The observation was also captured from a digital camera mounted on a commercial vehicle and not a law enforcement vehicle. The facts of this case do not demonstrate that law enforcement officers: a.) used the LEARN system to regularly monitor the movements of Yang or the GMC Yukon or Budget Truck, b.) used the LEARN system to view into the private curtilage of any residence or private property, c.) used the LEARN system to develop a history of the movements of Yang or the GMC Yukon or Budget Truck, or d.) used the LEARN system directly to track the movements of Yang or the GMC Yukon or Budget Truck on a particular day(s).
Considering all of these factors, the Court does not find in this case that Inspector Steele’s use of the vehicle detection report in LEARN to identify the possible location of the GMC Yukon constituted a search of Yang or the GMC Yukon requiring a warrant. The Defendant’s attempt to rely on Jones to assert that a warrantless search occurred in this case lacks legal support. That case is distinguishable from this one. The monitoring device in Jones — a GPS tracker — provided continuous contemporaneous information about the location of a vehicle, had been placed on the actual private vehicle without the owner’s consent, permitted (and was intended to permit) vehicle location and tracking in private walled off communities, and created a travel history of all of the movements of the targeted vehicle. None of these facts are in play here. There was no “common-law trespass” in this case, because the GMC Yukon’s license plate and the associated location was only captured when the vehicle traveled on public streets with other vehicles. No officer placed any device on the GMC Yukon or used technology targeting the Yukon which would permit law enforcement officers to peer into areas thought to be private by Yang or any other individuals. Yang does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the observation (and location of the observation) of the license plate of the vehicle he is driving on public streets with other vehicles. Class, 475 U.S. at 114.
Furthermore, the Court does not find that there was any form of ‘electronic trespass’ that might implicate a reasonable expectation of privacy. The location information in this case was not generated by Yang electronically or digitally surrendering private or confidential information to a third-party working in cooperation with law enforcement. The location information for the GMC Yukon was not identified by use of any invasive digital technology regarding its whereabouts or those of Yang. The location information was obtained through random observation(s) recorded on public streets.
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
