Supporting Law Enforcement Without Sacrificing Privacy

First off,  I love Warren County. I grew up in many places over my lifetime with the kind of people who wave when they pass you on a back road, who give you a wave when they see you on the porch, and think of ourselves as a community that believes in each other, and who still believe a person’s rights and they ought to be able to live their life without being watched or tracked.

That’s why I want to talk about something our county will soon be discussing: the additional ALPRs installed in many, many places within our county — more automated license plate readers.

Before anything else, I want to be clear: I support our deputies and police officers in both the County and the Town. They work hard, they respond when we need them, and they deserve tools that help them protect the public.

But we also have to look out for the everyday folks—the 99% of us who are just driving to work, dropping kids off at school, or heading to the hardware store, in our normal daily lives. Modern ALPR systems don’t just take a picture. They create a record of where thousands of people travel every day. And because Warren County sits right at the crossroads of I‑66, 340, 522, and 50, a system here wouldn’t just capture local traffic. It would log regional travel patterns for people who haven’t done a single thing wrong.

That’s where my concern comes in. I want us to grow, but I want us to grow smart. I want us to stay the kind of place where people feel safe—not just from crime, but from unnecessary tracking and data collection.

Once this kind of information gets stored in private corporate clouds, we lose control over it. We don’t get to decide who sees it, how long it stays there, or what it gets used for down the road. And that’s not a small, inconsistent thing. These systems have a much greater capacity to look, and we, the citizens of the county, go through our daily lives.

I want to say this as plainly as I can: we need every single one of our neighbors to get involved when the Town or County holds public hearings on adding more Flock cameras (which we already have working for us in the school systems) or on the potential to allow the development of data centers. These decisions affect all of us, and our voices do matter.

So as the county starts and continues these conversations, I think we need to insist on a few basic protections:

• Zero‑Knowledge Architecture
• A strict Data Firewall
• A Three‑Key Access System

And transparency on who is installing it and how exactly they will be tracked and managed.

These aren’t extreme ideas. They’re just common sense. They let us support law enforcement while still protecting the privacy and dignity of the people who make this county what it is.

I’ve put together a full policy blueprint and will submit it for public review. I hope our leaders will take the time to look it over and think about the kind of community we want to be—not just today, but for the next generation and the next. Our daily lives and future depend on it, and so does our security.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for caring about our home.

Walt Mabe
Front Royal, VA

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