Then why do we need a driver’s license and car tags?
Car tags are first and foremost a revenue avenue for governments. Did you think a little rectangle of metal every few years and a sticker each year in between costs over a hundred dollars per year? Remember how Schwarzenegger got elected governor?
The government introduced driving licenses primarily from a safety aspect to make sure the guy hurtling down the road toward you in several tons of mass has awareness of the rules of the road, and demonstrated familiarity with how to drive and obey those rules.
Neither driver’s licenses nor license plates create a log of when and where you have travelled that is available to government agents to peruse without a warrant.
Chatrie v. United States (2026)
”“society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car.” Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 310 (quoting Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (opinion of Alito, J.)). A new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the Government.
It followed a fortiori, Carpenter held, that “[a]llowing government access to cell-site records contravenes” expectations of privacy.
…
And contra the Government, Knotts does not support the view that accessing two hours of Location History is not a search. There, police officers put a beeper in a car to help them follow it from Minnesota to Wisconsin. The Court decided that the beeper did not turn the tail into a search, but was explicit in keeping its holding cabined to that rudimentary technology. The defendant had argued that a ruling against him would enable officials to conduct “surveillance of any citizen of this country” free from the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. 460 U. S., at 283. The Court took the concern seriously, stating that if technology progressed so as to allow more sophisticated surveillance, “different constitutional principles” could well apply. Id., at 284. And three decades later, five Justices in two opinions found that they did. When faced in Jones with a GPS device—which unlike the beeper allowed remote monitoring—they decided, notwithstanding Knotts, that privacy was implicated and a search had occurred. See supra, at 14–15. Yet even that was not all. When six years further on, the Carpenter Court held that accessing CSLI was a search, it recounted the Knotts-to-Jones progression to explain why Knotts did not stand in its way. See 585 U. S., at 306–307 (Knotts “was careful to distinguish between the rudimentary tracking facilitated by the beeper and more sweeping modes of surveillance”). For the third time, we reach the same conclusion today.
There are simply a lot of people in this thread that can’t wrap their heads around the fact the Court’s view of privacy has grown with technology, and broad, mass, unwarranted surveillance violates the Bill of Rights.