Professor Cristopher Moore. Courtesy photo
BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
Cristopher Moore is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute who among other things works on transparency, in AI “and its use in ‘consequential decisions’ that affect people’s lives and rights — such as risk assessment in the criminal justice system”. He came to the Los Alamos Reporter’s attention when he spoke to the Legislative Interim Committee on Courts, Corrections and Justice, chaired by Rep. Christine Chandler, just before the Los Alamos Police Department’s presentation to the community on the controversial Automated License Plate Readers.
Moore says at its worst, AI is an unaccountable black box that can be biased, inaccurate, or both.
“At its best, AI can shine a light on human decision-making, and create new forms of accountability where biases can be detected and corrected. In order to play this positive role, AI needs to be transparent and auditable, so that we can have a democratic discussion about whether, when, and how to use it,” he says.
Moore told Committee members that if they read the newspaper, they know that a lot of cities around the country have installed various types of cameras on roads and sometimes just on street corners, such as Flock, Axon, Clearview, and Shots Spotter.
“All of these technologies are designed by good people. I want to make that absolutely clear; I don’t view this industry as evil in any way and I’m not here to say that these technologies should be banned. I am here to say that cities and legislatures should be in the driver’s seat in deciding where and when these technologies are installed, how they collect their data, how long they keep that data, and how that data should be used,” Moore said.
He said one thing to keep in mind about these technologies is that they are not perfect. On TV, he said, it’s like, “Oh, you’re a match, the photo is a match”, but in the real world it’s more complicated and it could well be that the defendant is “the 12th match out of a possible 20, because the video is grainy or something like that”.
“So mistakes do get made. Even most police departments tell their officers a match in this data is not in itself grounds for an arrest. People are overworked and sometimes they cut corners and so there are cases where rather than treating it as a mere lead, which could be corroborated by other things, sometimes people get arrested,” Moore said.
He referred to a case where a grandmother spent five months in jail, even though it eventually turned out that she was not the woman in a photo and she should not have been arrested just based on a facial recognition match. The shocking thing about that case is that she had never even visited the state where the crime took place.
“Technologies are not perfect and the people who use them are not perfect either. There have been cases where police officers have been using Flock cameras on their girlfriends or their exes because they want to see where they’re going, whether they’re being faithful or whatever. This is not okay. It is unclear whether these cases are being caught as quickly as they ought to be. But this is not a case of a problem with the technology, it’s a case of wrongfully using it,” Moore pointed out.
He told the Committee members he thinks they want to think about and be aware of the imperfections of the systems.
“Even if these technologies were perfect, and even if they were always used properly, there are still I think some constitutional concerns because we live in the United States instead of say, China – that should be on our minds,” Moore said.
He noted that the Fourth Amendment is at the heart of our legal system.
“The idea is that if you want to search my home, you need to convince a judge that there is a good reason to search my home. You need to be pretty specific about why, and pretty specific about what you want to find there. The reason is that the British had a habit of going into people’s homes and rummaging and finding papers and saying, ‘Oh look, this person is an insurrectionist. And so that’s the kind of thing the Founding Fathers wanted to protect us against,” Moore said. “This is profound, this is saying that we want there to be a balance of power between individual citizens and the government even when the government is trying to solve crimes that actually occurred. Even if there’s good reason to search your home, even if you are a suspect, law enforcement still needs to convince a judge and get a warrant.”
He went on to say that searches should specifically be justified and they should be narrow.
“I don’t think the Founding Fathers would have liked the idea that we are at some level all being searched all the time for everything. It’s true that cameras are not looking into our homes, although sometimes people can look into your bedroom window or into your yard. What we are quickly moving towards is a situation where, when you walk out your front door – pretty much the moment you walk out your front door, you’re on camera,” Moore said. “People have a lot of different feelings about this, and if you’re driving your car in a public right of way, you can say, ‘I’m using the public roads, cars are big hunks of metal, you can do dangerous things with cars’. Why should you have any expectation of privacy at all. You could go further – you could say I’m walking down the sidewalk, I’m in public, why should I have any expectation of privacy. But I think this is an area where, again, the Founding Fathers didn’t imagine that you’re under constant surveillance just because you’re in that public setting.”
Moore noted that the courts have been trying to catch up with this issue but that it’s not easy for the judicial branch to keep up with changing technologies.
“For instance, in 2012, the Supreme Court said if police put a GPS tracker on your car, it constitutes a search, because then they can track wherever you go and they should need a warrant to do that. What’s happening now, is that automatic license plate readers can do that same job without the police having to place anything physical sticking to your car magnetically or whatever, and the Courts have not really ruled on this yet. It’s the same effect, it’s the same knowledge of your movements but my understanding is that in that 2012 case is that you’re putting something physical – you’re touching the car, therefore it’s a search,” he said.
Moore also discussed the 2018 Supreme Court case which ruled that police need a warrant to track cellphones. (https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-rules-police-need-warrant-track-cellphones: Link added by Los Alamos Reporter) He characterized the ruling in that case to the Committee as follows:
“Look if I track where your cellphone goes, then I can really build a chronicle of your life. It really gives me a very intimate window in your life. Even if I’m not listening to the cellphone conversation, which would require a wiretap and a warrant under current law, I can see where you’re going all the time. I can see you’re over by this cellphone tower and you’re over by that cellphone tower now, so I can tell whether you went to church, whether you went to an abortion clinic, whether you want to an anti-government protest, etc. etc.”
The “intimate window” phrase is a quote from Chief Justice Roberts. From https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/politics/supreme-court-warrants-cell-phone-privacy.html : “Mapping a cellphone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts,” he wrote, going on to quote from an earlier opinion. “As with GPS information, the time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.’”
Moore said earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3, and not along the usual lines, but in a much more broad philosophical way that what are called “geofence warrants”, when the police say, “look there was a robbery in this area, and they go to Google and they say, we want you to tell us everybody who, according to the cellphone location data on their Android phones, or on an Apple phone if you had a Google app open, we want to know everybody who was in the vicinity of that grocery store or whatever was robbed during that particular time”.
“The Supreme Court said this is a search. You need a warrant to do this. They sent it back and they didn’t say you can’t do this. They sent it back down to the lower court asking the lower court to evaluate whether this is a reasonable search according to the Fourth Amendent. In other words they said, if there’s a good law enforcement reason to gather this data, by all means, but you should go through that judicial gatekeeping of warrant.” Moore said.
He said what’s happening now is that in many cases, this data is in the hands of third party providers, and the police can simply buy it or contract for it or they may already possess it in the form of camera recordings.
“Lots of states are thinking about this. There are way too many maps and state laws that I did not want to inundate you with. There are lots of different states that are evaluating a lot of different approaches…. You want to be in the driver’s seat as to what out of state agencies get to see data from ALPRs because we have a neighboring state that has different opinions that we do,” Moore said.
He added that several of the Committee members were co-sponsors of SB 40 (Driver Privacy and Safety Act) during the 2026 legislative session. SB 40 establishes the first statewide regulations on how Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data is collected, stored, and shared by law enforcement.
“I think that’s a very interestng line in sand, saying that we’re not just going to free up data from ALPRs to any agency, we’re going to have criteria,” Moore said.