Who could’ve seen this coming? Oh – everyone?

About two months ago, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias accused Mount Prospect police of improperly sharing information from automatic license-plate readers. So it wasn’t surprising to see Giannoulias front and center in Monday’s Associated Press reporting about a company that operates those readers pausing its federal contracts amid concerns revealed in a recent audit.

Flock Safety has cameras in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, according to The AP, capturing billions of pictures every month. Legally, Flock Safety doesn’t own the images – they belong to the police agencies that have jurisdiction over the cameras and therefore have their own guidelines about handling data and requests for access.

Garrett Langley, Flock Safety founder and CEO, told The AP his company had pilot programs with Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection regarding fentanyl distribution and human trafficking. But Giannoulias expressed concerns over potential conflict with a 2023 state law that bars the data from going to out-of-state or federal agencies looking into immigration or abortion issues.

“We clearly communicated poorly,” Langley said. “We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users.”

Adopting a conciliatory tone is proper, but the way this story is developing provides little comfort to people who saw the red flags waving far ahead of the current situation.

According to the Illinois State Police, there were more than 200 million plate detections last month with more than 5.7 million hits, defined as when a read plate matches with Hot List or Hot Plate: “Numbers of stolen vehicles, wanted subjects, missing persons, AMBER alerts, suspended, revoked or expired registration or any other criteria … from a variety of sources including but not limited to: the National Crime Information Center, Law Enforcement Agencies Data System and the Illinois Secretary of State.”

That also means there are 194,414,279 scans in that same timeframe of no use to government body. Cook County is home to 352 of the 683 cameras the data dashboard covers. St, Clair has 130 and Peoria 60; no other county has more than 10.

So considering the vast volume of images and the relatively small amounts of highway locations monitored, this is perhaps not as widespread a data security concern as, say, the Department of Justice trying to forcibly access voter registration data.

But both contribute to a pattern of fairly questioning how much information citizens should provide to participate in the government we fund and whether said government is capable of safely executing the responsibilities it creates.

Registering cars and voters is logical. As is feeling such logic has natural limits and wondering how far they can be pushed.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.