When I was growing up, if a movie or TV show wanted to portray someone as mentally unwell, they’d usually rely on one or two hyperbolic tropes. The most culturally enduring, in my opinion, was the image of the wide-eyed person, wrapped in a tinfoil hat, babbling incoherently about how “they” were watching them.

“Sureeee they are,” the main protagonist would say with a condescending eye roll. Just another day in the life of Crazy Carl, right?

So what does it mean now, living in 2026, when “they” really are watching us all of the time?

I hope that any readers of this column will trust that I am not someone who is unwilling to acknowledge the nuances of the automated license plate reader (ALPR) conundrum. I am haunted by the pros and cons daily in conversations with friends, acquaintances, and in doing research for my (probably way too long) main story this week.

I understand that they are a potent tool for investigating crimes. I understand we probably wouldn’t have caught the Brown University shooter without them. I understand that thousands of people in need of help have been assisted by their presence across the country. I understand that nobody has an inherent Constitutional right to privacy while traversing a public street (although I would wager this needs to be decided at some point by the Supreme Court in light of this new technology our Founders never could have dreamed of).

So why, knowing all of that, does it just feel so gross to me? Why does it feel like I am being told to simply accept that The Land of the Free is rapidly becoming The Land of the Perpetually Surveilled?

I have learned over the course of my career working in newspapers that one of the most dangerous things that we can do is set a harmful precedent. Run a story that is clearly biased, run letters that allow people to openly slander one another without end, run a press release full of factual inaccuracies without checking — each of these situations creates a precedent whereby more harmful behavior is suddenly expected to be tolerated, because you’ve established a baseline of acceptance in a bad place.

That is how this scenario feels to me.

Yes, if we set up a dragnet of constant surveillance on every single street in America, we’ll easily be able to locate where bad actors and kidnapped children are within days, or even mere hours of the crime itself being committed.

However, we will also be setting the expectation that there is simply no such thing as a private moment outside of our homes anymore. Every trip you make where you come under the lens of one of these cameras — from something as innocuous as a trip to the grocery store, to something like attending a tenuous protest — becomes a matter of record to the authorities; a data point in a server maintained by a private company with their own agendas and overseen by imperfect humans — all of which is vulnerable to the kinds of data breaches that have become almost expected in our modern age.

Are we really so eager to stop crime (which has been on the decline for decades), that we are ready to surrender such a fundamentally “American” thing as our right to go where we want without being spied on?

I was nine years old when 9/11 happened — the 25th anniversary of which is right around the corner. I saw firsthand in the years afterward how a moment of pain, sorrow, and fear led us to willfully surrender our closely-held rights to privacy with the passing of the Patriot Act; a move that directly led to human rights abuses and, in case you forgot, the widespread, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. All under the banner of “national security”.

I haven’t forgotten. And I’m not going to simply accept this dangerous precedent either. I have a feeling a large majority of Americans — who these days can’t seem to agree on peanut butter and jelly being a winning flavor combination — are with me.