ACLU: AI Flagged a Driver’s Road Trip, Then Police Stopped Her

In September 2025, Grace Knowles was driving out of New Orleans toward Florida when an officer pulled her over for staying in the left lane too long. She says he later admitted the real reason: a plate-reader system had marked her travel pattern as suspicious. The ACLU published her account on Oct. 26, arguing that AI-driven stops like hers are spreading.

What happened on the road

Knowles, a 20-something from northern Virginia, was between jobs and on a road trip through Oregon, Texas and Louisiana. She says she was driving at a normal speed. The officer asked where she’d come from and where she was going, then asked her to prove it.

“I’m just a girl doing a road trip,” she told him.

Her proof was a pamphlet from a whiskey museum she’d visited. That seemed to settle him. He then said he wasn’t a regular cop, that he was with the FBI, and that scanning her plate had shown suspicious travel patterns.

He even invited her into his car to see the software. It showed a heat map of the US with circles where she’d been, each tied to a photo of her plate. Where were the cameras? Often on the back of overhead highway signs, he said, where drivers never look.

That’s her recollection, and nobody has confirmed it. No agency has said the officer worked for the FBI, and the ACLU doesn’t name the software or the state where she was stopped.

Why it matters

Pretext stops aren’t new. In one, police cite a minor, often invented infraction to cover the real reason for pulling someone over. What’s new is how the target gets picked.

Jay Stanley, the ACLU analyst who wrote the post, says he first saw the plate-reader company Flock pitching AI that alerts police to “suspicious” travel patterns in July 2025. He calls that a shift from investigating suspicious vehicles to generating suspicion where none existed. The ACLU’s answer is blunt: end license plate surveillance and location tracking altogether.

The federal version is already on the record. In November 2025, an AP investigation found Border Patrol monitoring millions of US drivers, with an algorithm flagging cars by where they started, where they ended and the route between. Agents pass tips to local police, who then stop drivers for speeding, a missed turn signal or a dangling air freshener. Officers call these “whisper,” “intel” or “wall” stops. CBP told the AP it doesn’t detail specific operational uses, citing national security.

For anyone who drives long distances on a budget, the uncomfortable part is simple. An algorithm scoring your route has no idea why you drove it. A cheap road trip between jobs is just another pattern.

It’s a quieter cousin of the case where an Anthropic AI model sent police a fake murder tip. In both, software rather than a person decides who gets a closer look.

The $76 verdict

Courts have started testing the tactic. On Sept. 28, a federal jury in San Antonio found Bexar County liable for a traffic-stop program that used plate-reader data. The case, heard in Federal Judge Orlando Garcia’s court, came from a March 2022 stop of Alek Schott on Interstate 35 near San Antonio.

Schott was held for 76 minutes. The jury awarded him $76, a dollar a minute. His lawyers at the Institute for Justice are now asking the court for an injunction against the county’s stops.

KSAT reported that license plate data flagged Schott’s trip before deputies ever pulled him over. Accounts differ on who raised the alarm. The ACLU says a federal fusion center tipped off local police. The AP reported the tip came from Border Patrol agents. The Institute for Justice says analysts and anonymous tipsters flagged the route.

What to watch next

Flock’s next product is the bigger question. Wired reported on Aug. 19 that the company is testing an AI tool called OS Investigate, which ships with 69 prewritten prompts. The ACLU describes the system as already in use by some police. Flock says it’s still being tested with a small group.

The ACLU post doesn’t include a response from the FBI or Flock. It also isn’t known whether Bexar County will appeal.

The next signals to watch are the injunction ruling in San Antonio and whether OS Investigate moves beyond its test group.