Police in Kansas Think the License Plate Reader Is Mightier Than the Pen

Canyen Ashworth, an information technology consultant and writer in Kansas, criticized local government only to be punished with illicit surveillance.
 
Ashworth wrote an op-ed in The Kansas City Star condemning the way police in Lenexa, Kansas, cooperated with ICE in a raid on a local Mexican restaurant. He criticized a Homeland Security Investigations agent for threatening observers with arrest. And he questioned why a local politician had her citizenship investigated.
 
The official response? It was not a rebuttal. It was surveillance.
 
The very day Ashworth’s op-ed appeared, Lenexa police began using automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology to track his movements as he drove around town.
 
Police needed a predicate for investigating Ashworth that went beyond writing an op-ed. They pointed to four posters someone had glued around town showing a picture of an ICE agent with the caption, “remember when we killed fascists.” That supposed “crime” – not even clearly spelled out in city statutes – became the justification for deploying powerful ALPR technology. Other posters advertising missing pets and piano lessons did not trigger such a digital dragnet.
 
“A suspect has been developed in the case of the City Center Posters,” the police chief emailed patrol officers. He issued a “be on the lookout,” or BOLO, alert for Ashworth and added, “This is my MYOC.” The ACLU explains that the acronym means “make your own case” – in effect telling officers: there is no warrant, so find a reason to stop him.
 
Ashworth drew the obvious conclusion.
 
“I really don’t know how else to interpret that, other than somebody didn’t like what I said,” he told KCUR. “So they started looking for reasons to get me in trouble.”
 
Police never linked Ashworth to the posters. The ACLU described them as “arguably aggressive” but “nonetheless speech protected by the First Amendment.”
 
Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, told KCUR: “The idea that you can essentially just make something up to throw against the wall and see if it sticks to be able to go after someone is a really chilling and dangerous thing.” First Amendment attorney Bernie Rhodes put it even more starkly: this isn’t merely chilling speech – “this is subzero.”
 
This case, as petty as the issues are, demonstrate how easily surveillance tools can become instruments of retaliation.
 
ALPR systems were sold to the public as crime-fighting technology – tools to locate stolen cars or track violent suspects. But like so many forms of modern surveillance, they can easily be repurposed. With the push of a button, a critic becomes a target. A dissenter becomes a data point.
And this is not an isolated episode.
 
Last year, we covered the case of Rumeysa Orturk, a 30-year-old Tufts University Ph.D. student who was tracked and manhandled by plainclothes federal agents and transported to a detention facility in Louisiana, where she was held for more than a month. Her offense? She signed an op-ed in The Tufts Daily, along with 32 others, criticizing Israel and urging divestment. Whatever one thinks of her views, the piece was relatively mild compared to the often-unhinged anti-Israel rhetoric heard at campus protests.
 
In both cases, speech preceded scrutiny, showing that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is not merely about property or procedure. It is a structural safeguard for the First Amendment. 
 
Otherwise, if the government can monitor you at will, it can intimidate you at will. If officials can sift through your movements, your associations, and your data whenever you criticize them, free speech becomes a conditional privilege rather than a constitutional right.
 
Some may dismiss these episodes as small beer – minor skirmishes in a vast surveillance landscape. That would be a mistake.
 
Today it is an op-ed writer tracked by license plate readers. Tomorrow it could be anyone whose views fall out of favor. Technology makes such targeting frictionless. Constitutional guardrails must be strong.

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