A Connecticut law that took effect at the beginning of October imposes new restrictions on police use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which enable what a federal judge recently described as "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." The law reflects the bipartisan backlash against AI-assisted cameras that record images of passing cars billions of times a week, building databases that police can use to track drivers, identify other vehicles in their vicinity, predict itineraries, and conduct searches based on a wide range of vehicle characteristics.
Connecticut previously imposed no statutory limits on ALPRs, a fact that underlines how readily police can access license plate data, which they can search without any sort of judicial review and often without meaningful internal supervision. But the law's provisions, while promising in some ways, fall short of the reforms recommended by critics who warn that unconstrained use of ALPRs threatens the privacy of innocent motorists across the country.
As of today, DeFlock's mapping project has identified nearly 145,000 ALPR cameras in the United States, most of which were installed by Flock Safety, the leading vendor. That network includes more than 1,500 cameras deployed by Connecticut law enforcement agencies, three-quarters of which use the technology.
The concerns underlying the new law, which Gov. Ned Lamont signed last May, echo objections raised in other states. Last February, for example, CT Insider reported that out-of-state agencies had searched ALPR data from Connecticut thousands of times for immigration enforcement purposes. When police in Johnson City, Texas, searched Connecticut data for a missing woman, the log noted that she "had an abortion," which reinforced concerns that ALPR information might be used to enforce abortion bans.
As elsewhere, ALPR critics in Connecticut also have complained about a lack of transparency. In April 2025, for instance, South Windsor began using Flock cameras without any public notice. The resulting consternation prompted the city council to cancel the program early this month. CT Mirror reports that South Windsor is "at least the sixth Connecticut community to end or suspend the use of ALPRs this year, following Windsor, Killingworth, Ledyard, Milford and Newtown."
Compared to those moves, the new state restrictions are pretty weak tea. But they include some potentially meaningful changes, and they highlight how lax oversight of ALPRs has been.
The new law restricts the sharing of ALPR data, which henceforth will be limited to Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island unless an agency in another state obtains a judicial warrant. The law says the data may not be used for immigration enforcement, to target conduct protected by the First Amendment, or for investigations related to "reproductive" or "gender-affirming" health care services. It also bars the placement of ALPRs near facilities that provide such services or organizations that primarily serve immigrants.
The original bill specified that ALPR data could be retained for no more than seven days unless it is tied to an ongoing criminal investigation, subject to a warrant, or used for toll enforcement. The final version of the bill extended that limit to 21 days. Flock's original default was 30 days. But last August, in response to widespread criticism of ALPR surveillance, the company began recommending a seven-day limit. Connecticut's Police Officer Standards and Training Council, which last month sent Lamont a report that included suggested reforms, thinks the state should adopt the seven-day standard.
Under the new law, police may search ALPR data to "assist in the recovery of a stolen motor vehicle," "assist in locating a missing or endangered individual," or "assist in the apprehension of an individual with an outstanding warrant." They also may query the database for information "relevant and material to a specific active investigation of a criminal offense in which there is reasonable suspicion that the offense has been or is being committed." When they do that, their agency must record "the reason for the access and any associated case number for the complaint or incident that is being investigated and is the basis for the access."
It is remarkable that Connecticut lacked such basic safeguards until now, and it is not clear how effective the new rules will be. Since July 1, 2025, Virginia has required that cops state a "specific purpose" for ALPR searches, including "the offense type." Yet last April, WHRO reported that Norfolk police often give "incomplete and imprecise reasons" for ALPR queries, including "suspect," "suspicious," and "investigation" or "inv."
Connecticut's "reasonable suspicion" requirement is more lenient than the standard that the Institute for Justice favors. The organization's model statute would generally require a warrant based on probable cause for ALPR queries. The proposed law makes exceptions for "exigent circumstances," stolen vehicles, and toll, parking, or traffic enforcement.
Connecticut's law also addresses the sort of blatant abuses that have fueled opposition to license plate cameras, including cases in which cops have been caught using ALPR data to stalk personal nemeses, ex-girlfriends, possibly unfaithful spouses, and objects of romantic interest. The law says an officer "who is found to have knowingly accessed, used or disseminated automated license plate reader data with malicious intent for purposes outside of the provisions of this section shall be subject to disciplinary action including, but not limited to, suspension, cancellation or revocation of certification" for police work.
The law establishes two additional remedies that could deter ALPR abuses. It authorizes the attorney general to sue ALPR contractors for damages and injunctive relief when they violate the new restrictions. It also allows "any aggrieved individual" to sue "a public agency" that flouts the rules.
"The law, for a first bite at the apple, is not bad," Ken Barone, manager of the University of Connecticut's Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, told CT Insider. Given that "there was a benchmark of nothing," he said, the attempt to constrain and track ALPR use is "a big step forward."
The post Connecticut's New Restrictions on Flock Cameras Highlight the Dearth of Meaningful Privacy Protections appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Alaska's U.S. Senate race features four candidates. Two are named Dan Sullivan: the Republican incumbent, and a political neophyte.
Republicans say the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot is an illegal act of election interference. The federal government is now suing to keep Alaska from certifying the election results, but only if their guy loses.
"One of the biggest election scandals in history has been the Democrats' installation of a fake Dan Sullivan (not the US Senator) to deceive voters in Alaska," White House advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X. President Donald Trump called it "a disgrace."
"Democrats pulled a dirty trick by enlisting a decoy, Daniel J. Sullivan, to run against Republican Alaska Sen. Dan S. Sullivan," The Wall Street Journal editorialized. "Please spare us the lectures about election interference."
Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued the state of Alaska and its election authorities.
"Should Alaska certify any electoral results tainted by the inclusion on the
ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan," the filing warns, "the State and its officers will fail in its obligation to protect the integrity of its election. The United States accordingly brings this lawsuit to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska."
Alaska uses a ranked choice ballot, in which voters are given four candidates and rank each one in order of preference. Along with the Sullivans, the candidates are Mary Peltola, a Democrat who is polling narrowly ahead, and Gerald Heikes.
The Justice Department lawsuit says Republican voters would be too confused by the presence of two Dan Sullivans to properly fill out their ballot: "Some supporters of Senator Sullivan likely will inadvertently vote for Daniel J. Sullivan. Other supporters of Senator Sullivan likely will be confused as to how to rank the three Republican candidates as to defeat Peltola."
Given this, "there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity," the lawsuit proclaims. "To guard against this danger, it is vital that [Alaska] not certify any election result" in which "(1) Senator Sullivan does not win the election; and (2) had all votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan been cast instead for Senator Sullivan and Alaska's rank-choice process played out accordingly, Senator Sullivan would have won the election."
In other words, the state of Alaska should only certify the election if Sullivan wins; if Peltola wins, but it's close, then that could suggest it "lacked integrity," and the state must instead conduct "an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan."
The lawsuit has a number of problems. First and foremost, it's completely inappropriate to treat an election as fair only if your candidate wins, even if it is what Trump believes.
It's also too late to bring an action of this kind: The state elections division decided in June to bar Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot, but a state superior court reversed and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld the reversal before the end of that month.
And yet the feds waited until less than two weeks before Election Day—when ballots have been printed and tens of thousands of Alaskans have already voted—to bring this suit.
If the Justice Department was truly concerned about voter confusion, it should have brought a lawsuit months ago. But even then, it's not clear what it could have done: "DOJ has no power to decide which candidates can appear on the ballot," writes UCLA School of Law professor Richard L. Hasen.
Besides, it's not illegal to mislead or even outright lie to voters. "If 'voter confusion' were a legitimate reason to overturn election results, that would imperil a great many election winners, as voter ignorance—and exploitation thereof by candidates—is a widespread and longstanding problem," writes George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin.
It does seem more likely than not that Daniel J. Sullivan is indeed running just to pull votes from the senator with the same name.
But as I pointed out earlier this month, the ranked-choice ballot itself can take care of this problem: Republican voters who wish to reelect Sullivan can simply rank both Dan Sullivans first and second; if and when Daniel J. Sullivan fails to capture more than 50 percent of all votes, he will be eliminated, and his votes will transfer to all their second choices.
The ballot itself makes it clear which Sullivan is which: The sitting senator is labeled as both Registered Republican and incumbent.
Despite Miller's claim that letting two Dan Sullivans on the ballot "reveals pure contempt for voters," it's the objecting Republicans who appear to lack faith in their voters.
"People are totally confused," Trump told reporters. "A lot of people don't know what 'incumbent' means."
When CNN's Dana Bash asked Attorney General Todd Blanche what crime is being alleged, he replied that "it depends." He elaborated: "There could be a crime, but the real wrong here is that Alaskans are going to be confused and will not have their vote heard."
This isn't even Alaska's most complicated election in recent memory. In 2010, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican primary to Joe Miller, she announced that she would still run as a write-in candidate—requiring voters to not just know about her ahead of time but to add her name by hand.
Improbably, Murkowski prevailed, defeating Miller by more than 10,000 votes.
If Trump, Blanche, Miller, and others are truly concerned that the ballot will be too confusing for Alaska Republicans, they could expend some energy showing them how to use the ranked choice ballot.
In fact, Sullivan has done just that, posting a video on X explaining how to rank all candidates except Peltola.
What they can't do is force a state to reject the results if their guy loses.
"Alaskans don't need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year's ballot," Murkowski wrote on X. "The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit."
"I believe that this lawsuit is abusive in its intentions and borders on frivolous in its arguments, and that it is destined for defeat in the courts should it reach the merits," Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson noted in a statement. "This lawsuit is an assault on the constitutional design by which states, not the federal government, run elections. The issue in question is one for the Alaska Supreme Court to decide under Alaska law, and the Alaska court did just that."
The post Justice Department Targets Alaska Senate Election appeared first on Reason Magazine.
On Aug. 26, 2024, in Fort Myers, Florida, I answered a knock at my door to find a police officer waiting to arrest me. My first thought was my 12-year-old daughter, whose room was nearby. “Can she hear this?” I wondered. “Does she know what’s going on?” I had answered the door in my flip-flops, T-shirt and shorts, not realizing it would be all I had to keep me warm as I was thrown into an ice-cold jail cell, then into a steel cage in the back of a police van and finally locked up in a second jail. They told me I was being arrested for attempting to lure a child — roughly the same age as my daughter — from a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, a town 300 miles away that I had never been to.
The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about when I would see my wife and daughter again. How would I explain why I was under arrest for a crime I didn’t commit in a city far across the state? Especially when I didn’t even understand what was going on myself.
The police ran my two vehicles through a database of license plate readers, which didn’t show my car anywhere in the entire county, much less near the restaurant. Yet based on the say-so of glitchy AI, they ruined my life.
After pledging the title to my truck for bond, I left the police station completely traumatized. I later learned that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office uploaded a picture of the McDonald’s security footage into an artificial intelligence facial recognition system, which erroneously flagged me as a possible match. Jacksonville Beach Police then conducted a photo lineup not with the victim, but with a McDonald’s employee who was not an eyewitness.
Meanwhile, the officer leading the investigation ignored a mountain of evidence of my innocence. I have a prominent scar on my face that the suspect didn’t have. The same employee who picked me out of the photo lineup also said the suspect was a “regular customer,” but I live more than five hours away. The police ran my two vehicles through a database of license plate readers, which didn’t show my car anywhere in the entire county, much less near the restaurant.
Yet based on the say-so of glitchy AI, they ruined my life.
Until I was arrested for a crime I did not commit, I was a successful commercial crabber. I’ve loved crabbing since I first tried it as an 8-year-old kid hanging out on the Maryland docks. In the 40 years since, I’d built a beautiful life. I had a fulfilling career on the water, and an incredible wife and daughter and great friends. Anyone who knew me would tell you that I was a family guy. I was happy. All that changed after the police hauled me to jail and posted my mugshot online.
Weeks later, the Florida state attorney’s office dropped all charges. Now, I’m suing the officers, the city of Jacksonville Beach and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. In addition to damages, I am asking the court to order the city and the sheriff’s office to overhaul their procedures for using facial recognition technology.
It had taken two months to prove my innocence and my mugshot stayed on a police department website for nearly a year. At first, I could barely leave the house, terrified that someone would confront me for this revolting crime or see me with my daughter and call the police. Even when I was with people who knew I had been falsely accused, I couldn’t stand them looking at me and wondering even for a second, “Maybe he actually did it.”
I fell behind on rent, and when I was finally able to get back out on the water, it was too late. My seafood buyers had moved on. I was hemorrhaging cash. I had to turn my back on the ocean and start doing lawn care to provide for my family. Even harder than finding the money to rebuild my business is rebuilding the trust and credibility I lost because of the government’s colossal screw-up.
if there is one thing I am not, it’s a quitter. I will not quit until I get justice and the government makes amends.
When I told my daughter about the reason for the arrest, something I’d waited to do until after I had proven my innocence, she couldn’t stop laughing. To her, the accusation was that outrageous. While she laughed, I cried, just grateful to know that she was still in my corner and saw me for the person I was: her loving, caring, happy-go-lucky dad.
I am the first to admit that I am no angel. I’ve done stupid stuff in my past — gotten in some fights, spent some nights in jail. Any of my friends would agree that if there’s a loudmouth at the bar, I’m the one to tell him off. But I would never hurt a child. Ever.
When I’ve gotten in trouble, I’ve paid my debt to society. But the government doesn’t want to pay theirs. When I got into a bar fight, within a day I was hauled in front of a judge. Yet more than two years after my wrongful arrest, no one has even apologized, much less been held accountable in any court of law. And nothing has changed. I am still suffering. All because some cops used shoddy AI facial recognition, ignored contradictory evidence and, instead of protecting little girls in Jacksonville Beach, arrested an innocent guy in Fort Myers.
The government keeps trying to sweep what they did to me under the rug, hoping that I will give up and move on. But if there is one thing I am not, it’s a quitter. I will not quit until I get justice and the government makes amends. That’s why I have turned to the courts. They must hold the police accountable for altering my life forever. The record is clear. Justice should not take years to impose.
(Editor’s note: The Jacksonville County sheriff’s department told Wired Magazine, “Due to pending litigation, we would be unable to comment further on the incident.”)
The post Florida police ruined my life with a false AI match. Now I’m demanding justice. appeared first on MS NOW.
Paul Skalnik was one of the most prolific jailhouse snitches in American history. A new best-selling book, Catch the Devil, chronicles Skalnik's career helping prosecutors secure dozens of convictions—despite being a serial liar and criminal. His cartoonishly long rap sheet included elaborate frauds, multiple grand thefts, and sexual assault of a child; at various times, he passed himself off as a Southwest Airlines executive, a high-powered attorney, and a Vietnam War hero. In July, Reason's Billy Binion interviewed author Pamela Colloff, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and reporter at ProPublica.
Q: How is it possible for someone with such an intense history of dishonesty to still earn the state's trust for decades?
A: I think you hit upon the big question of the book, right? Skalnik was a former police officer himself, so he sort of knew how the game worked. When he got to whatever county jail he ended up in, he could size up whoever it was that prosecutors most wanted a conviction against. And he would produce these incredible quote-unquote "confessions." And in return for his testimony about those confessions, he would usually be let free.
You can imagine how there were police and prosecutors who bought this. I think what becomes more difficult as he's used more widely in [Pinellas County,] Florida—where he helped send upward of 40 men to prison—at what point does someone say, "What are the odds that this guy in the jail has a better batting record than our best detectives?" No one ever says that.
Q: The book covers a lot of disturbing cases, but the one central to it is a murder case in Florida. Can you set the scene?
A: There was a 14-year-old girl named Shelly Boggio who was found in a body of water. She'd been stabbed over 30 times, and the assumption was that she'd been sexually assaulted.
The investigation quickly narrows down to a man named Jack Pearcy, who had a long history of violence against women. He was the last person seen with Boggio. When he's interviewed by investigators, he realizes they know too much. So he pivots to saying that he had his housemate—Jim Dailey—with him that night, and that it was Jim who committed this crime. Jim did not have that kind of record, and there's no physical or forensic evidence tying him to the crime, or any motive whatsoever.
Skalnik is brought in very shortly before the trial starts. He is moved in the jail to be close to where Jim Dailey was. Within 24 hours, he says he has procured Dailey's confession—a total stranger who's awaiting trial. It was a story that really played upon jurors' sympathies. He talked about how Jim Dailey had supposedly told him about stabbing Shelly Boggio to death and how she'd been staring at him in this pleading way, but she wouldn't die. It's this horrific image, and he is sentenced to death.
Q: What makes you think Dailey is actually innocent?
A: There have been over 200 people in the U.S. who were sentenced to death who have since been exonerated. We know that jailhouse informants—who are notoriously unreliable—are a factor in 25 percent of those wrongful convictions.
As far as Jim's case, there's no there there. When you see a case with three jailhouse informants, no physical evidence, no motive, and your quote-unquote "eyewitness" is the main suspect in the case? There are a lot of questions.
Q: To me, the secondary theme was that when credible evidence may exonerate someone after a jury has rendered a verdict, it is depressingly difficult to get another chance.
A: I am obsessed with this idea that the system is built to compound its own errors. When new evidence comes out—and there's a lot of new evidence that comes out over the years that really points toward his innocence—you would think that would be enough. For some very good reasons, a jury verdict is sacrosanct. But what you see is that courts really look backward at precedent and jury verdicts rather than forward at new evidence.
Jim gets terrific attorneys in this case—too late. They do incredible work, and it doesn't matter. Too many judges have rubber-stamped this testimony by Paul Skalnik. There's no way for the courts to essentially say, "Hey, let's go back and look at this holistically and see if any of this makes sense." It was shocking to me to see that.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Pamela Colloff on America's Biggest Jailhouse Snitch, Wrongful Convictions, and Criminal Justice appeared first on Reason Magazine.
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