The Plate Belongs to the State. Your Movements Do Not.

A sheriff’s deputy told me recently that automated license plate readers raise no constitutional problem, and he gave two reasons. The first I had heard a hundred times: you are driving in public, so you have no privacy. The second was new to me.

The government owns the plate.

He was not being evasive. He believed it, and he said it the way people say things they have been told by someone they trust. The logic is clean enough to survive a parking-lot conversation: the State issues the tag, the State owns the tag, the State requires you to bolt it to your bumper and display it — so the State can read it, record it, store it, and search it, as often as it likes.

That argument deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal. Here is the whole of it in one line: the State owns the tag, but it has never owned the record of where you drove it — and the cases do not treat state title to a plate as deciding who may assemble that record. The rest of this piece is why.

He is right about the plate

Start with the concession, because it is complete.

North Carolina law says exactly what the deputy said it says. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-63, “Registration plates issued by the Division under this Article shall be and remain the property of the State.” The Commissioner may “summarily take possession of any plate” believed to be used illegally. Refusing to surrender an illegible plate is a Class 2 misdemeanor. You never owned the aluminum. You were loaned it, on conditions, and the State can take it back.

Most states have equivalent statutes. So the premise is not a talking point. It is black-letter property law. Everything after the premise is where the argument collapses.

To be clear, this is the opposite of the sovereign-citizen argument. Those claims deny that the State may require a plate at all — that licenses, registration, and tags are illegitimate. This essay accepts every bit of that machinery. The plate is the State’s; displaying it is the law; refusing is a crime, and rightly so. We are not contesting the plate. We are contesting the permanent, searchable record built from it. That distinction is the whole point: you can comply with every plate law in North Carolina, bolt the tag on exactly as required — and still object to being tracked. Obeying the law is not consent to be surveilled for having obeyed it.

The ownership theory has a pedigree — in a different kind of case

The deputy’s argument is not something he invented, and it is not new. It has a genuine doctrinal home. That home is the First Amendment.

In Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans (2015), the Supreme Court held that specialty license plates are government speech, not private speech, and Texas could therefore refuse a Confederate-flag design. Part of the reasoning was ownership and control: the State designs the plate, issues the plate, and keeps title to it. A plate is a government-issued identifier, and the government may decide what appears on it.

Ownership also does real work in one narrow corner of search-and-seizure law. When police confiscate or revoke a tag, a driver generally has no protected possessory interest to assert — because the tag was never his.

That is the entire useful life of the argument. It settles who controls the design and who may repossess the metal. The cases have not extended it to decide who may build a permanent record of where a car has been.

No court has upheld a camera network on ownership grounds

This is the part worth sitting with. Courts have been rejecting license-plate privacy claims for forty years, and they have never needed the ownership theory to do it. The leading decisions rest on a different rationale — compelled public display, not title:

• New York v. Class (1986). The Supreme Court found no privacy interest in a vehicle identification number, reasoning that federal law requires the VIN to sit in plain view and that automobiles are subject to “pervasive governmental regulation.” Plain view. Not ownership.
• State v. Donis (N.J. 1998). “It is unreasonable to have an expectation of privacy in an object required by law to be located in a place ordinarily in plain view from the exterior of [an] automobile.”
• United States v. Ellison, 462 F.3d 557 (6th Cir. 2006). “The very purpose of a license plate number … is to provide identifying information to law enforcement officials and others.” The majority never mentions who holds title.
• People v. Bushey (N.Y. 2017). Running a plate is not a search, because the plate is displayed publicly by legal mandate.
• The Norfolk case. In January 2026, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia upheld Norfolk’s 176-camera Flock network, holding that discrete photographs at scattered locations do not capture “the whole of a person’s movements.” The court described plates as “vehicle identifier[s] … [that] generally must be displayed under state law.” Display again. Not ownership. (Our read of the Norfolk ruling — and why it is on appeal in the Fourth Circuit that governs North Carolina.)

Then there is the strongest evidence that the ownership theory is not taken seriously by the people who defend these systems for a living. When the Department of Justice filed in the Norfolk case to urge dismissal, it argued that no American can reasonably expect privacy on public roads. Public exposure. That was the theory. The government’s own theory was public exposure, not ownership — on our reading of the filing, it did not rest on state title to the plate at all.

Ownership is not the Fourth Amendment test

Set aside what courts have happened to say and go to the doctrine itself. The deputy’s argument assumes that Fourth Amendment protection tracks property title. It has not worked that way since 1967.

Katz v. United States moved the analysis away from property: the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. The Court has reinforced that repeatedly.

In Byrd v. United States (2018), the Court held that a driver’s absence from the rental agreement did not automatically defeat a reasonable expectation of privacy: an otherwise-lawful possessor of the car may still be protected. He was not on the title, and was protected anyway.

United States v. Jones (2012) added a property-based trespass theory on top of Katz, but the Court was explicit that a trespass to obtain information is an additional route to a search — alongside, not instead of, the Katz framework. Property makes protection easier to establish. Its absence does not extinguish it.

So the syllogism fails at the joint. “The State owns X” does not produce “no Fourth Amendment interest in X.” That inference has never been the law.

Carpenter and Chatrie answer this directly

The deputy’s argument is, at bottom, a claim that when someone else owns the thing generating the data, the person who generated it has no say. The Supreme Court has now strongly undercut that reasoning twice, in the two most important location-privacy cases of the modern era.

In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the cell-site location records were generated and held by the wireless carrier in the ordinary course of business — not by Timothy Carpenter. The Court held that acquiring seven days of them was still a search, because they revealed “the whole of [his] physical movements.”

In Chatrie v. United States, decided in June 2026, the Court went further. Google collected and stored the data, not the user — and unlike a plate, the user had affirmatively enabled Location History. Justice Kagan, writing for the Court, held that acquiring the geofence location data was a Fourth Amendment search — leaving the validity of the particular warrant to the lower courts — and cast a skeptical eye on how voluntary that opt-in really was when it arrives buried in terms nobody reads. She catalogued what short stretches of location data expose: visits to “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, [and] the by-the-hour motel.”

Now apply that to a plate. Google’s user had enabled Location History. The State compels you to display the plate, on penalty of law, and then declares that it owns the thing it forced you to carry. That is not a stronger consent argument than Chatrie. It is the weakest one available. A government cannot mandate that you wear an identifier, retain title to it, and then cite its own title as the reason your movements are unprotected. That is not consent. It is circular.

Chatrie did not decide the ALPR question, and honesty requires saying so. It decided geofence warrants and left warrant validity to the lower courts. But it removed the ownership premise from the board.

The plate is not what is being searched

The deepest problem with the argument is that it answers a question no one asked.

No one claims a privacy interest in a rectangle of stamped aluminum. Nobody cares who holds title to the metal. The interest at stake is the record — the accumulated, searchable, timestamped history of where a particular vehicle has been, assembled without suspicion and retained by a private vendor.

Owning the tag no more authorizes assembling that history than owning the roads authorizes it. The State owns the pavement too. Nobody argues that ownership of Market Street permits a permanent log of everyone who drives it.

Consider the closest analogy. Under 22 C.F.R. § 51.7, “A passport at all times remains the property of the United States.” The federal government issues it, owns it, and can revoke it. No one has ever suggested that this ownership permits the government to warrantlessly reconstruct every place you carried it. The ownership of an identification document says nothing about the government’s authority to catalogue the movements of the person carrying it.

The plate is the sensor tag. The search is of the record. Conflating the two is the error at the center of the argument.

What the argument would actually authorize here

Arguments should be tested against what they permit, so test this one against New Hanover County.

Public records show New Hanover’s Flock network was queried 2,980,082 times between January 2025 and June 2026 — roughly sixteen months. The median search reached 6,177 separate camera networks (how we counted). Every searching agency and every searching officer was redacted from the records. The Sheriff’s Office contract runs $219,000. Internal audits flagged two searches built around racial descriptors — one for “2 young teenage Black males” — each blocked and then permitted once the racial descriptor was stripped out. In response to the reporting, Sheriff McMahon cut retention from 90 days to 30 and moved audits from annual to monthly.

Now ask what the deputy’s theory has to say about any of that. Nothing. That is the point. If state title to the plate settles the constitutional question, then it settles it at three million searches and at three hundred million. It settles it for thirty-day retention and for thirty-year retention. It settles it whether the searching officer is identified or redacted, whether the purpose is a homicide or a hunch, whether the requesting agency sits in Wilmington or in a state whose laws New Hanover voters have no voice in.

A theory that draws no line is not a legal standard. It is a claim of unlimited authority sourced from a piece of stamped metal.

The limits that actually exist

North Carolina drivers are not left with only a constitutional argument. Three real constraints already apply.

The state statute. Article 3D of Chapter 20 (§§ 20-183.30 through .33) governs ALPR systems directly. Captured data may be “obtained, accessed, preserved, or disclosed only for law enforcement purposes,” and may not be used to enforce traffic violations. The data is “confidential and not a public record.” Access is limited to criminal-justice officers “for a legitimate law enforcement purpose pursuant to a written request.” Data must be destroyed within 90 days absent a documented preservation request. Violation is a Class 1 misdemeanor. Whether a standing, nationwide, network-wide sharing arrangement satisfies a statute written around case-by-case written requests is an open question in North Carolina — and a more concrete one than who holds title to a tag.

Fourth Circuit precedent. North Carolina sits in the Fourth Circuit, which held in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc), that Baltimore’s aerial-surveillance program was a search under the Fourth Amendment. That decision binds courts here.

And the Fourth Circuit reinforced the point again in September 2026. In Andrews v. Baltimore City Police Department, No. 18-1953 (4th Cir. Sept. 24, 2026), the court held that police use of a cell-site simulator — a device that forces a phone to reveal its location — is a Fourth Amendment search. The officers escaped damages only on qualified immunity, because the right was not “clearly established” back in 2014; going forward, the search holding is now circuit law. The reasoning matters for plate readers: what made the technique a search was that it let the government reconstruct a person’s location in a way ordinary observation cannot — the same “different in kind, not just degree” logic the Supreme Court used in Carpenter, and the same logic that a networked ALPR system, searchable across time and jurisdictions, invites a court to apply here.

The state constitution. Article I, Section 20 of the North Carolina Constitution prohibits general warrants — searches of unnamed persons and unspecified places — in its own, expressly anti-general-warrant terms. A network that scans every passing vehicle and retains the results is worth measuring against it.

The honest version

The deputy’s argument fails, but the instinct underneath it is worth naming. He is trying to locate the authority for something his agency already does. He reached for the most tangible thing available — the State issued this, so the State may read it.

The correct answer is less comfortable for everyone. The lawfulness of a camera network does not follow from who owns the plate. It follows from what the network builds, how long it keeps it, who may search it, on what showing, and who checks. Those are the questions. They have not been answered here.

Ask your commissioners. Ask for the written requests. Ask who ran the three million searches, and why the answer is redacted.

Your car. Your routes. Your record. The State owns the plate. It does not own the pattern.

Bring this to your commissioners → For attorneys: the caselaw →

Mark Spencer Williams is an attorney in Wilmington, North Carolina. This post is general legal commentary, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Case citations should be verified against the official reporters before use in any filing. Last updated August 22, 2026.