Automated License Plate Readers and Data Centers as Networked Mass Surveillance Infrastructure: The Systemic Erosion of Privacy and Free Expression

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are often evaluated as discrete police tools, although their public power arises from cross-vendor socio-technical infrastructure. This article examines roadside and mobile sensors, vehicle-attribute classification, cloud archives, commercial databases, real-time crime center integration, interagency access, automated alerts, and police action. Flock Safety supplies the principal documentary case because unusually extensive public records permit system-level tracing; Axon/Fusus, Motorola Vigilant/VehicleManager, and federal access to commercial ALPR data establish the wider vendor-independent boundary. A structured documentary analysis of 59 sources triangulates official records, peer-reviewed research, vendor materials used only for stated functions, and record-based investigations. It integrates boundary critique, control-structure mapping, feedback analysis, constitutional doctrine, a STRIDE-informed threat model, and empirical research on policing effectiveness and surveillance effects through 3 August 2026. The analysis identifies four conditional mechanisms: infrastructure aggregation, authority diffusion, asymmetric feedback, and rights invisibility. The article reformulates the Rights Control Deficit (RCD) as a non-arithmetic profile relation between operational demands and effective governance capacity and applies it to three documented configurations and a clearly labeled normative benchmark. Seven falsifiable propositions specify variables, indicators, suitable methods, and disconfirming conditions for later empirical study. A rights-preserving hybrid-intelligence architecture combines bounded automation with judicial authorization, short retention, sensitive-location protections, immutable audit, availability safeguards, independent review, contestability, sanctions, and credible termination authority. The evidence identifies capabilities, activated pathways, and conditional risks; it does not estimate population prevalence or a universal ALPR-specific causal effect. Meaningful human oversight is an institutional control property, not merely an officer’s presence at an interface.