Where we stand

Priority campaign

Surveillance and the right to protest

Protest is how people hold power to account when the usual channels stall. But the tools that make surveillance cheap — location bought from your phone carrier, face recognition run across a crowd, records pulled from data brokers without a warrant — make it just as cheap to identify and log everyone who turns out. When showing up means being matched and filed away, fewer people show up. That chill isn't a side effect; for whoever's watching, it's the point. And it's why the warrant question isn't academic: if the government never has to ask a judge before buying its way into your movements, the freedom to assemble gets quieter every year. Make the government get a warrant now, or lose the room to protest later.

So we work both ends — protect yourself today, and push to close the loophole that makes the tracking legal.

Surveillance on your street

The cameras that read every plate

Automated license plate readers — ALPRs — sit on poles and patrol cars and photograph every vehicle that passes, logging the plate, the time, the location, and, increasingly, a “fingerprint” of the car itself into a searchable database that agencies share with one another. No suspicion is required; everyone who drives past is recorded, and the reads stack up into a record of where you go and when. It’s the same mechanism as the rest of this page — your movements, logged and reachable — just bolted to a streetlight instead of your phone. We take apart how these systems work, how secure they are, and whether they actually cut crime on the cameras & sensors page.

The courts are moving, but not evenly, and not yet to a line anyone can point at. In Carpenter (2018) and again in Chatrie (June 29, 2026) (opens in a new tab)^[3] the Supreme Court held that the record of your physical movements stays protected by the Fourth Amendment even when a company holds it. Chatrie went further and refused the government’s argument that a short enough slice of location data escapes the Amendment altogether: where the Fourth Amendment applies, the Court wrote, it applies regardless of the quantity of information obtained. Two hours was enough.

That reasoning runs against the one federal court to have ruled squarely on a city-wide plate-reader network. In Schmidt v. City of Norfolk a judge upheld Norfolk’s 176-camera system on January 27, 2026, holding it was not a search because intermittent snapshots at intersections cannot capture “the whole” of anyone’s movements — a quantitative test of exactly the kind Chatrie declined to draw. That ruling is on appeal in the Fourth Circuit (opens in a new tab)^[4], the same court the Supreme Court reversed in Chatrie. Argument is tentatively set for December 2026. But the honest reading cuts both ways: Chatrie distinguished the older cases partly because phone data follows you indoors, and plate readers only watch public roads. Norfolk has something to work with too, and nothing yet settles it.

Which is why the first step to pushing back is knowing where the cameras are — and they’re already around campus.

And the guardrails are thinner than the pitch suggests. In most departments an officer runs a search with their own login — frequently with no warrant, sometimes without even a case number — and the searches are rarely audited, so the same access that finds a stolen car finds an ex just as easily. That isn’t hypothetical: the Institute for Justice (opens in a new tab)^[5] has catalogued at least two dozen cases of officers using Flock and similar readers to stalk partners, exes, and in one instance a stranger — including a Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania officer who pleaded guilty in 2021 to tracking his estranged wife. Almost all of them surfaced only because the person being followed noticed and filed a complaint. The question isn’t whether the data can be misused — it’s who’s checking.

Campus campaign

Pitt only ruled out Flock

After students raised concerns about Flock cameras, SGB met with Pitt Police, and on September 14 it published Pitt Police’s answer.^[8][9] The department has no agreement or contract with Flock and no access to its cameras or data, the cameras aren’t on University property, and Pitt doesn’t control where they go or how they’re used. Pitt’s own security cameras, the statement said, are owned and managed by the Integrated Security Department.^[9]

That rules out one company. Around the Union and the Cathedral, DeFlock’s crowdsourced map shows 12 plate readers: eight tagged Motorola, three Flock and one Genetec.^[10] One sits on Bigelow by the Cathedral lawn.^[11] The city doesn’t use Flock either, but it has run other plate readers since 2006^[12], and the DA’s office has added more than 3,000 countywide since 2016^[13], plus cameras in Oakland with Pitt and UPMC.^[14] The question isn’t whether it’s Flock. It’s who runs these, and who sees the data.

The data doesn’t stay with whoever put the camera up. Motorola’s plate system, Vigilant,^[15] shares scans with police nationwide through a service called NVLS, and its DRN unit sells plate scans from repo trucks to lenders and insurers.^[16] Records the ACLU obtained show ICE searching Vigilant data through a broker in 2017.^[17] Motorola pitches police on billions of scans beyond their own.^[16]

Pitt’s own rules don’t cover any of this. Its 2019 camera policy (opens in a new tab)^[18], for about 1,400 cameras on the Oakland campus,^[19] keeps footage for as long as the recorder has room, up to 28 days.^[18][19] It allows hidden cameras with no notice, and it never mentions plate readers, face recognition or cloud vendors.^[18]

Pitt put up 98 new Avigilon cameras in early 2020 alone.^[20] Avigilon is Motorola’s video brand,^[21] and it sells face recognition as an add-on: put a face on a watch list, and it alerts on every match.^[22] The policy says nothing about that, or about training AI on the footage.^[18] At Duke, footage of 2,000 students became a dataset used around the world.^[23] Pitt’s policy promises to track new developments.^[18] This is one.

Harrisburg is already moving. By early September, legislators from both parties had introduced at least nine bills to limit or ban plate readers, seven of them in six weeks.^[24][25] Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, called the cameras “not something in the public interest.”^[26] Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, said his bill would apply “to the technology and activity, not merely to one company or brand.”^[26] Both parties want limits. Pitt doesn’t have to wait for them.

Our ask: write it down. Update the 2019 policy to cover every plate reader and face-recognition tool Pitt runs, buys data from, or shares footage with, and answer in writing what it keeps, for how long, and who sees it. We’re taking that to the Integrated Security Department alongside SGB, which is already asking about Flock.^[9] It isn’t a big ask: Penn State runs its Flock pilot under a written campus police policy^[27], and the city puts a 10-day limit in writing.^[12]

Money that can't be frozen

Crypto and the right to protest

Freezing a movement's bank account is one of the oldest ways to shut it down without firing a shot. It happened in Nigeria in 2020: as the #EndSARS protests against police brutality grew, the Feminist Coalition — a group funding protesters' food, medical care, and legal aid — had its bank account and donation link cut off after the central bank leaned on the payment processors. So they asked for Bitcoin instead. It couldn't be frozen, the donations kept coming, and they raised the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the movement alive. That's the civil-liberties case for cryptocurrency: money the state can't switch off.