Better late than never definitely has its place in the halls of legislative power – but that doesn’t equate to a free pass for rushing half-baked ideas onto the books.

The General Assembly enacted the Tamara Clayton Expressway Camera Act in 2019, a pilot program that began deploying automated license plate readers on Chicago area highways in August 2021. As of July 2025, with more than $50 million invested, there are 588 cameras in 21 counties.

A more detailed history is available at isp.illinois.gov – click on Criminal Investigations and then ALPR Transparency Page – and it’s worth noting that the state police here do as good a job as any agency in detailing objectives, sharing data and linking directly to contracts and statutory language.

That said, it hasn’t exactly been a seamless transition into a modern surveillance state. In 2023, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias endorsed a plan to prohibit law enforcement agencies outside Illinois from accessing our plate reader data to track or penalize, a measure pitched as protecting abortion and immigration rights. Then, in June 2025, he accused Mount Prospect police of improperly sharing such data with Texas police and told the network operator, Flock Safety, to prevent any future illegal access.

This year, lawmakers have debated House Bill 5151, a set of commonsense APLR limitations that should’ve been attached to the technology all along.

The bill – with two dozen sponsors but idling in the House Rules Committee since April 17 – flips the permission framework by declaring it unlawful for any agency to use, operate or access any reader or captured data unless expressly authorized and compliant with the new rules.

Those rules seem sufficiently broad to strike a balance between the utility of technology as a public good and personal privacy concerns. For example, authorized uses include Amber Alert, Silver Search and endangered missing person advisories, ongoing criminal investigations such as stolen vehicles or hit-and-run crashes and outstanding felony warrants.

There also are revenue concerns, such as electronic tolls and parking enforcement, and stipulations that foreign entities and their employees should have lesser baseline privacy expectations. If approved, the bill would put a three-day retention limit on captured data absent its role as evidence for potential criminal prosecution.

As with many issues, some changes might not seem significant until a defense lawyer argues against the inclusion of improperly captured or retained data in court. It might be unsettling to consider what privacy abuses could happen in the meantime, but people in that camp are likely already frustrated that HB 5151, which doesn’t exactly seem fast-tracked to enactment, is trailing so many years behind the initial rollout.

Expecting the government to keep pace with technology is a losing battle, yet deliberation should always have a seat at the table.

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