Bringing the Fight Against Warrantless Surveillance to the Wisconsin Supreme Court

The ACLU of Wisconsin and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued over warrantless searches of ALPR databases like Flock.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a petition directly with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on behalf of the Wisconsin Council of Churches (WCC) and an individual pastor in Green Bay asking the Court to require the government to obtain a judicial warrant in order to query data collected by Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) networks. The lawsuit asserts that retroactive searches of this kind of ALPR data amounts to a “search” that must comply with standards mandated by the Wisconsin Constitution.

The Petitioners are suing four Wisconsin cities – Green Bay, Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha – each of which operate these systems and conduct searches using them. The WCC represents more than 2,000 congregations in Wisconsin who provide religious services, confidential counseling, and other sensitive community programming, including in these jurisdictions. Petitioners allege that the government’s ability to retroactively search these vast, AI-assisted networks of ALPRs tramples upon Wisconsinites’ expectations of privacy and amounts to a “search” that can only be legal if performed with a warrant or a lawful exception to the warrant requirements.