Mass Surveillance by License Plate: The City of Marco Island Fourth Amendment Case

In this episode of Unwritten Law, Mark Chenoweth and John Vecchione are joined by Andreia Trifoi to discuss NCLA’s constitutional challenge to the City of Marco Island’s use of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) — a surveillance system that records and stores the movements of every driver entering or leaving the island.

Because Marco Island has only three bridges, residents are photographed and tracked multiple times a day, with their location data retained for years and potentially shared with other agencies or private companies. The hosts explain why this dragnet surveillance goes far beyond ordinary police observation and raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns.

This episode explores how emerging surveillance technology is testing the limits of constitutional privacy — and why courts must confront these questions before mass tracking becomes the norm.