Forbes: “Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement, digging through license plate databases with billions of records. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date…

Rekor’s big sell is that its software doesn’t require new cameras; it can be installed in already deployed ones, whether owned by the government, a business or a consumer. It also runs the Rekor Public Safety Network, an opt-in project that has been aggregating vehicle location data from customers for the last three years, since it launched with information from 30 states that, at the time, were reading 150 million plates per month. That kind of centralized database with cross-state data sharing, has troubled civil rights activists, especially in light of recent revelations that Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office was sharing license plate reader data with states that have banned abortion.