A former Pentagon AI policy director has raised a measured but urgent alarm: the quiet spread of automated license plate readers through American communities may be laying the groundwork for a surveillance infrastructure that contradicts the nation's founding commitments to privacy and liberty. Mark Beall's warning arrives as citizens, lawmakers from both parties, and even the technology's own makers grapple with a question that has shadowed every powerful tool of the modern state — who watches the watchers, and what rules bind them before the architecture of control becomes too entrenched to