In a single 30-day period, Cheyenne’s Flock cameras logged 223,424 plate reads in a city of 66,507 people, captured simply because a vehicle passed a camera. No crime, no warrant, no suspicion required. The system records the plate, the location, and the time. Eventually, you can stack enough cameras and images for the government to reconstruct where a car traveled across town. That is already happening in Cheyenne, Jackson, Glenrock, Lusk, and on the Wind River Reservation. The best part? Nothing in Wyoming law stops cities from adding more.Lawmakers had an opportunity to change that. And for a moment, it looked like they might.
The original proposed solution, 27-LSO-0033, started with a clear principle: government surveillance should be prohibited unless specifically justified.Government could not install these readers on public buildings, roads, or highways, could not use them to identify vehicles, and could not hire a vendor to do it. The proposal also addressed other forms of surveillance, including biometric identification and geolocation tracking. Exceptions were contemplated for stolen vehicles, missing persons, and legitimate investigations, generally requiring a warrant. .
But that broader approach did not survive the committee’s revisions. In July, the Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology and Digital Innovation Technology directed LSO staff to narrow it down and work with law enforcement. This resulted in a working draft 27-LSO-0139.
The committee reviewed the revised draft on September 28–29 but took no vote. Instead, members sent it back for further work ahead of their November 19–20 meeting in Cheyenne. For now, it remains just a working draft.
The Proposed “Ban” That Is Already Acting Like a Permission Slip
Section 31-21-102 announces that no person, including government, may use an automatic license plate reader (ALPR’s). Sounds great on the surface… until you get to the exceptions.
So who gets a permission slip? According to the draft:
- Law enforcement may run the cameras to compare every plate, in real time, against a hot list drawn from the national crime database, stolen-vehicle lists, missing-person alerts, and Wyoming Department of Transportation registration records.
- A judge may authorize adding a plate, including part of a plate, to a hot list when law enforcement alleges the vehicle is connected to a crime. A criminal traffic offense counts.
- A supervisor may add a plate without a court order under “exigent circumstances.” The draft leaves the duration as “XX hours.” Yes, the blank is still blank.
- Cities may use the same systems for parking enforcement on a public street, highway, right-of-way, or any other place where parking is regulated. That’s the open road, not just a gated parking lot.
And what happens to all that data? Hits can be kept until the case ends. Non-hits are supposed to be deleted within three minutes. For parking enforcement, the data is not supposed to be checked against hot lists and must be deleted within 12 hours after a citation is resolved, or within 12 hours of capture if none is issued.The definition then steps aside even further. School-bus cameras are excluded. So is anything the bill calls an “automatic traffic enforcement system” such as red-light cameras, speed cameras, toll cameras, and port-of-entry cameras. Rename the device or change its stated primary purpose, and the prohibition does not apply. They even removed the biometric and geolocation limits from the earlier proposal.
There’s another practical problem, the draft itself, flags. Legislative staff noted that the photograph and associated data captured by these systems may qualify as a public record under the Wyoming Public Records Act the moment the image is taken and processed. Under Wyoming law, public records are generally open to inspection unless a specific exemption applies. That creates a direct conflict with the bill’s short deletion windows: non-hits are supposed to be deleted within three minutes, and parking data within twelve hours. If someone files a public records request for images from a particular time and place before or during that window, agencies are typically required to preserve the records until the request is handled. In other words, the very images the bill says must be quickly and permanently deleted can be locked in place by an ordinary open-records request. Staff flagged the tension and suggested the committee may need explicit language so the deletion rules are not undercut by the Public Records Act or so these images are clearly placed outside ordinary public inspection. Without that fix, the “delete it fast” protections on paper can be defeated in practice, and the images of ordinary drivers will not disappear as quickly as the draft claims.
This draft does not provide the robust constitutional protections as being represented. They are thin operational limits that can be adjusted with minor language changes in a future session and produce large consequences.
Consider how easily those limits could change.The “XX hours” blank can be filled with 72, 168, or longer. “Exigent circumstances” could be broadened or made permanent through future amendments.. Additional databases can be added to the approved hot-list sources. The “sole purpose” parking exception can be expanded to other municipal functions, allowing cameras to serve additional purposes beyond parking enforcement. Definitional carve-outs can be widened by reclassifying new devices. Retention windows can be lengthened “for investigative practicality.”
Each of those is a one-line tweak. None of those changes would require rewriting the entire law. But each could expand how much information the government collects, retains, or searches about ordinary drivers.
And here’s what doesn’t change, even under the current draft: The three-minute deletion rule applies only to non-hits and does nothing to stop the initial capture of every plate. The network itself remains authorized.
The Technology Already Outruns the Rules
Cato Institute researcher Matthew Cavedon warned the committee the technology products have already advanced well past what this draft addresses. Flock’s higher-end systems can build vehicle fingerprints from dents, stickers, and other identifying characteristics. Separate surveillance technologies can read Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and radio-frequency signals from phones and wearables inside cars. A bill focused narrowly on license plate readers risks leaving these capabilities unrestricted.
And technology doesn’t stand still. Once cameras are on the poles under the bill’s exceptions, new software or additional sensors could expand their capabilities without requiring lawmakers to revisit the law. The technology can evolve while Wyoming’s protections remain frozen in place.
That is the danger of a partial ban. Supporters can claim Wyoming has already “banned” the technology, while the cameras remain mounted, license plates continue to be scanned, and data is still compared in real time. And when new surveillance capabilities emerge, the existence of a supposed ban could become an excuse to avoid revisiting the issue. Instead of establishing meaningful limits on government surveillance, Wyoming risks creating a legal framework that allows the technology to expand beyond the protections lawmakers intended. The distinction matters: limiting certain uses of surveillance technology is not the same as prohibiting the technology itself.
What Happens If It Passes?
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, Section 4 of the Wyoming Constitution protect against unreasonable searches and seizures.But those protections raise a simple question about 27-LSO-0139: Does this proposal actually limit government surveillance of people who aren’t suspected of a crime, or does it establish the rules for allowing it to continue? Under the proposed framework, cameras could still scan passing license plates and compare them against designated lists. Certain records could be retained for investigations, parking enforcement, or other authorized purposes. The draft puts limits on how long some data can be kept and who can access it, but those rules don’t stop the cameras from collecting the information in the first place. Nor do they necessarily prevent that information from being used to reconstruct someone’s movements.So, what actually changes if this bill becomes law?
After this bill, can a city still bolt the cameras to the pole and run every plate that passes? Yes.
Can the government still keep a file on people who have done nothing wrong? Under certain circumstances, yes.
And arguably the worst part: those who decide when an ordinary driver becomes someone on the list are the same agencies authorized to operate the cameras.
The committee has not sponsored 0139. The November 19–20 meeting in Cheyenne is the next decision point. What remains unresolved is whether Wyoming will prohibit this form of surveillance or establish a legal framework for its continued use.
Wyoming doesn’t need a partial ban that allows government surveillance to continue under a different set of rules. It needs a complete prohibition on automatic license plate surveillance and a clear standard for emerging technologies. Mass surveillance of innocent people should be prohibited by default, with any proposed exceptions requiring explicit legislative authorization, not quietly permitted until lawmakers decide to claw that authority back.
No loopholes. No permission slips. Just protect Wyoming’s privacy.