PublicPlates

Local queue

Sightings captured on this device, signed with your local keypair, awaiting submission to the federated moderator network.

Public Index

Confirmed records of government-owned vehicles. Each plate carries a chain-of-custody trail of independent sightings and the status of FOIA / state vehicle records requests filed against it.

→ Demonstration data. A live deployment would federate across multiple independent records offices, each running its own moderation, with a shared verification protocol.

About this project

Federal law enforcement vehicles operate in public space. Their license plates are public information. The Federal Government has, for decades, indexed citizen vehicle movements through commercial ALPR networks at sub-second speed. Citizens wishing to know who owns a federally-plated SUV operating in their neighborhood file state records requests, wait months, and are routinely denied under law-enforcement exemptions.

The premise is straightforward. Government vehicles have no privacy interest. Civilian vehicles, under existing law, do not either — that is the legal regime that has long permitted Flock, Vigilant, and Rekor to capture every plate in America and resell the resulting graph to police, federal agencies, and insurers. Pedestrians with phones see what those companies' cameras see. The same observational access can be made available to citizens. Faces are never captured. Identities are never resolved. The photograph itself is processed in the browser and discarded after the OCR pass.

What gets published is narrower than what gets captured. Capture is broad. Publication is decided by humans at the moderation layer — only sightings of government-owned vehicles are promoted to the public index. The discrimination is administrative, not technical.

On symmetry

An earlier draft of this document said civilian plates would be discarded at source — that the project would maintain a known-government-plate whitelist and silently drop everything else. That position was self-defeating: the whitelist has to come from somewhere, and discarding non-matches at source breaks the discovery mechanism the project depends on.

It also conceded the wrong premise. The legal regime that permits commercial ALPR networks to capture every plate, lawfully and without consent, applies symmetrically. The whitelist-only design was a posture, not a principle — an attempt to make the project legible as restrained. The actual position is stronger: plates are either private or they are not. The law has long held they are not. The regime should run symmetrically. Citizens deserve the same observational access to public space the surveillance industry already exercises against them.

Operating principles

1. Symmetric capture, deliberate publication. The same observational regime that already watches citizens is made available to citizens. Capture is broad. Publication is decided by humans, not algorithms — only sightings of government-owned vehicles enter the public index.
2. Chain of custody. Each sighting is signed on the originating device with a per-install keypair. The server holds only the hash chain. Any record in the public index is traceable to N independent, device-signed observations, none altered post-capture.
3. Federated moderation. Multiple independent records offices each run their own instance, share a verification protocol, and never depend on a single moderator. A captured or compromised office does not capture the network.
4. Automated FOIA. Each confirmed plate triggers an automated public-records request to the appropriate state DMV or federal GSA fleet office. Denials are logged. Appeals are templated. The administrative record is itself part of the public record.
5. Public infrastructure, public oversight. Source code is open. The verification protocol is open. Moderation logs are public. The same standards a government records office is held to apply here.