Chicago City Wire

The public interest law firm that recently filed a potentially precedent setting lawsuit in the protection of private citizens from government snooping recently racked up a victory in another case that protects Americans from government overreach.

In late May, the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) filed a lawsuit in federal court against Illinois law enforcement and other government officials regarding the increasing use of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) – of particular concern, LJC said, with recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI).

And recently, in a case LJC signed onto with an amicus filing, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the “Chevron doctrine,” a 1984 ruling that gave federal agencies extraordinary powers in interpreting and applying laws approved by Congress. The case, Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo, was filed by a group of herring fishermen in February 2020.  

“For decades, the Chevron doctrine has allowed unaccountable agencies and bureaucrats to determine the scope of their own power—and to use that excessive power to run roughshod over Americans’ rights. We applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Chevron, restore courts’ power to independently interpret statutes, and significantly rein in the administrative state’s unlawful overreach,” LJC Senior Counsel Loren Seehase said in a statement. “Now that courts are no longer shackled to agencies’ interpretations, agency rules can be fairly interpreted—and we look forward to challenging their overreach.”

In the ALPRs case, LJC, through two Cook County plaintiffs, argues that the monitoring, which began in Cook County and is now expanding statewide, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches.

The complaint filed May 30 by Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois names the Illinois State Police (ISP), ISP Director Brendan F. Kelly, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, and Gov. J.B. Pritzker as the defendants.

“Defendants are tracking anyone who drives to work in Cook County—or to school, or a grocery store, or a doctor’s office, or a pharmacy, or a political rally, or a romantic encounter, or family gathering—every day,” the lawsuit states, “without any reason to suspect anyone of anything, and are holding onto those whereabouts just in case they decide in the future that some citizen might be an appropriate target of law enforcement.”

Reilly Stephens, counsel at LJC, said given the advancement in technology, particularly AI, the lawsuit is the next step in the fight to protect the right to privacy.

“The Fourth Amendment was written long before we had the technology to track peoples’ movements,” Stephens told the Cook County Record for an earlier story. “And now with the introduction of AI, this is going far beyond just the reading of license plates.”

“This is one piece of the larger problem” of infringements on individual privacy," Stephens added.

If successful, the lawsuit could upend the use of ALPRs by hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country.

In 2019, the Illinois General Assembly approved legislation that funded ALPRs through Chicago’s expressways. In 2022, the program began to expand beyond Cook County.

“This system has brought Big Brother to Illinois,” plaintiff Stephanie Scholl said in a statement. “Automatically tracking and indefinitely storing information on everyone who drives into the state completely crosses the line. That isn’t a reasonable security measure—it’s a dystopia playing out in real time, in our backyards.”