ACLU publishes driver’s account of a stop over “suspicious” travel patterns

A road trip became an interrogation about where Grace Knowles had been—and whether she could prove it. In an account published by the ACLU on October 26, she said an officer stopped her in September 2025, called her travel patterns suspicious and showed her a map of places her license plate had been photographed.

The account, told to ACLU author Jay Stanley, is newly public; the stop itself happened more than a year ago. Stanley presents it as a warning about police using AI and license-plate records to identify supposedly suspicious journeys, rather than simply searching those records while investigating a vehicle already linked to suspected wrongdoing.

A museum pamphlet became proof

Knowles, a woman in her 20s from northern Virginia, told Stanley she was between jobs when she set out. Her route included Oregon, Texas and Louisiana. She had left New Orleans that morning and was heading toward Florida when an officer pulled her over, saying she had spent too long in the left lane. Knowles disputed that explanation.

The questions moved to her itinerary: where she was coming from, where she was going and whether she could demonstrate that she had visited New Orleans. She said she showed him a pamphlet from a whiskey museum she had visited. After that, she recalled, he relaxed and explained that scanning her plate had revealed suspicious travel patterns.

According to Knowles, the officer identified himself as an FBI special agent and discussed investigations involving human or drug trafficking. Her recollection was less certain about whether he said he was contracted for that work. The ACLU account does not identify the officer or the software he used, or establish whether an AI system generated the flag.

he said he thought I was lying about being in New Orleans because he didn’t show any hits there.

Grace Knowles, speaking to the ACLU’s Jay Stanley

Knowles said the officer invited her into his car to see the records. The display resembled a heat map of the United States, with circles marking places she had traveled. Clicking a location brought up a photograph of her plate. Asked how those images had been collected, he told her cameras were widespread, including on highway signs.

From recorded sightings to suspicion

Automated license-plate readers record vehicle information together with the time and location of a sighting. Police can then search those records during investigations. Gizmodo’s October 27 coverage explains that basic mechanism and names Flock Safety and Axon as suppliers to law enforcement. Neither company is identified as the provider of the system Knowles described.

Stanley’s objection concerns what happens when analysis of those movements supplies the suspicion itself. He argues that using AI to suggest suspects changes the role of the database: a tool for looking into a known concern becomes a way to select people for police attention. That is the ACLU’s interpretation of the wider practice, not independent verification of how Knowles was selected.

The ACLU also connects the concern to pretextual stops: encounters in which an officer cites a minor traffic violation while pursuing another investigative purpose. Stanley warns that expanding AI analysis of travel records could expose more innocent people to stops, searches and potentially dangerous encounters. Knowles’s account offers a close view of one such encounter; it does not measure how often these stops occur.