Florida's first license plate reader law made the data secret. The power to pull the cameras arrived 9 years later.

On August 31, 2026, the Florida Department of Transportation revoked every permit it had issued for an automated license plate reader sitting in the right-of-way of a road on the State Highway System. Agencies got 30 days. The deadline is September 30, 2026, and the same memorandum says the Department will stop issuing new permits entirely.

That is the part that got covered. I went and read the statute the memorandum is built on, in 4 different years of the Florida Statutes, and the interesting part is what that section used to be.

In 2014, Florida's first law about license plate readers was a law that made the data secret. That was all of it. There was no permit power in it, and nothing about where a camera could go or when it had to come down. A public records exemption, and a line at the bottom saying the exemption would repeal itself in 5 years unless the Legislature voted to keep it. The authority the Department used on August 31 was added in 2023.

Same section number. 9 years apart.

The video is about Michigan and it is here on purpose. Florida's 30 days is a clock on hardware. Michigan's contract is where I went looking for the clock on the data, and there were 4 of them.

This one runs long, because the receipts are long. It goes in this order. What the Florida order says, the same statute read in 4 volumes, why it does not reach every road in the state, the mileage split, what Michigan's contract says about retention, and the 1 request a Florida driver can send before September 30.

And if you hit reply, I read it. Replies are the only number in this whole operation that beehiiv cannot show me.

1 - The Florida Department of Transportation order is Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, dated August 31, 2026, signed by Will Watts, P.E., Chief Operating Officer and Assistant Secretary, and copied to Rudy Powell, P.E., Chief Engineer of Operations.

2 - The memorandum gives permit holders 30 days from August 31, 2026 to remove the devices, which puts the deadline on September 30, 2026.

3 - The State Highway System carries 12,287.004 centerline miles, recounted on September 10, 2026 from the Florida Department of Transportation 2025 State Highway System mileage workbook, State Total row 88.

4 - Every public road in Florida together carries 125,157.581 centerline miles, recounted the same day from the Florida Department of Transportation Public Road Mileage 2025 workbook, State Total row 356.

5 - The State Highway System is 9.82% of Florida's road miles, and the memorandum does not reach the other 112,870.577 miles.

6 - The State Highway System carries 54.18% of Florida's daily driving: 373,481,134 daily vehicle miles traveled out of 689,391,401, both figures from those same 2 workbooks.

7 - Section 316.0777 of the Florida Statutes has been amended twice since it was created. The History line at the foot of the current version reads "s. 1, ch. 2014-170; s. 1, ch. 2019-16; s. 5, ch. 2023-70," read from the Florida Senate 2025 volume on September 10, 2026.

8 - In the 2014 volume of section 316.0777, subsection (2) is the public records exemption and subsection (5) is the repeal date. There is no subsection about installing or removing anything.

9 - In the 2025 volume of section 316.0777, subsection (2) is the installation and removal authority, and the repeal date is gone.

10 - The disclosure sentence that lets a Florida driver ask for the record of their license plate has been in the statute since 2014. It sat at subsection (3)(b) then and it sits at subsection (4)(b) now.

11 - The State of Michigan contract with Flock Safety, MA250000000832, runs 172 pages and carries 4 separate retention clocks: a 30-day rolling purge at section 6 on page 50, no clock at all on anything an end user downloaded inside those 30 days, a perpetual license to Anonymized Data on page 32, and a Recipient's copy held longer than the contractor's standard retention period on page 33. Recounted page by page from the PDF on September 10, 2026.

12 - Superseded, do not cite: nothing in this issue supersedes a figure published in an earlier Norseletter. Every number above is new.

It is 1 page. The authority paragraph, verbatim:

The reason paragraph, verbatim:

Then the revocation, which contains a drafting error I am quoting as it appears: "all LPR-related LPR related approvals issued by the Department to a local law enforcement agency are hereby revoked and must be removed by the permittee within 30 days of the date of this memorandum." If the agency does not do it, the Department says it will pull the hardware itself.

The half of the page that almost nobody led with is the last paragraph, headed Discontinuance of All Future LPR Placement Requests:

A removal order runs out in 30 days. That sentence does not run out at all.

Section 316.0777 is on the Florida Senate site in every year it has existed. I read 4 of them.

The 2014 repeal line read like this, verbatim:

So the first thing Florida decided about license plate readers was that the pictures of your car were confidential and exempt from the public records law. The Legislature then kept that decision alive in 2019, and only in 2023 did anybody write down that the transportation department gets to say where the cameras go and when they come down.

The 30-day clock everybody is watching is in that 2023 language, at subsection (2)(b): "An automated license plate recognition system must be removed within 30 days after the Department of Transportation notifies the requesting law enforcement agency that such removal must occur." The Department did not invent 30 days on August 31. It read it off the page.

Chapter 316 of the Florida Statutes has a definition of "street or highway" in it, at section 316.003(90), and it is enormous: "The entire width between the boundary lines of every way or place of whatever nature when any part thereof is open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular traffic." That is every public road in the state. It is sitting in the same chapter as the plate reader statute.

They did not use it. Subsection (2)(b) reaches out of chapter 316 entirely and points at section 334.03(24), "State Highway System," which means "the interstate system and all other roads within the state which were under the jurisdiction of the state on June 10, 1995," plus what the state has built or been handed since.

Florida then defines the county road system and the city street system so they cannot overlap with it. A county road is not a state road. A city street is not a state road. The memorandum cannot touch either.

You can watch that limit work in real time. On September 1, 2026, the day after the memorandum, the Lake County commissioners held a 5-0 vote to revoke permits for license plate readers in county rights-of-way. They had to vote on it separately because the state order does not reach county roads.

Both numbers come out of workbooks the Department publishes, and they cut in opposite directions.

The State Highway System is 12,287.004 centerline miles. Every public road in Florida together is 125,157.581 centerline miles. So the memorandum reaches 9.82% of the road miles in the state, and leaves 112,870.577 miles of county road and city street alone.

Those 12,287 miles carry 373,481,134 daily vehicle miles traveled out of a statewide 689,391,401. That is 54.18%.

About 1 road mile in 10, and more than half of everything Florida drives.

Florida's 30 days is a clock on hardware. It says nothing about the data, and the data clock is the one I have already been all the way through somewhere else.

The State of Michigan contract with Flock Safety, MA250000000832, runs 172 pages. Section 6 on page 50 is the sentence everybody quotes: "Flock Safety includes 30 days of data with a rolling purge." The very next sentence of the same paragraph says "End users will have the ability to download any data within the 30 days to store for longer periods of time if needed," and it puts no clock on the copy. Page 32 has the State granting Flock "a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute such Anonymized Data," created in part for "the training of machine learning algorithms." Page 33 says data handed to a third-party Recipient may be "retained by Recipient for a period longer than Contractor's standard retention period."

4 clocks, and the 30 days is only on the first one. That is the video at the top of this email.

Every page number there is a page of the PDF, recounted from the file on September 10, 2026.

Section 316.0778 does not set a retention period for any of this. It says the Department of State, working with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, establishes a retention schedule with a maximum period in it. So the answer to how long Florida keeps the pictures is in a records schedule, in a different agency, and I have not pulled it yet.

The cameras come down on September 30. The retention schedule is what decides how long everything they already took stays where it is, and Michigan's contract is why I do not assume the hardware coming down is the same thing as the data going away.

The thing worth doing before September 30 is in the oldest part of the statute.

Section 316.0777(4)(b) says any plate reader information "relating to a license plate registered to an individual may be disclosed to the individual, unless such information constitutes active criminal intelligence information or active criminal investigative information."

May, not shall. It is permission for the agency, and a records custodian can still decline. It is still the only door in the statute with your name on it, it has been unlocked since 2014, and in about 3 weeks a lot of the hardware behind it comes down.

2 things make the ask harder to wave off:

Florida's public records law has no fixed response deadline. Section 119.07(1)(a) says a custodian shall let you inspect and copy "at any reasonable time, under reasonable conditions," and that is the whole clock. The date you sent it is the only evidence of delay you will ever have, so send it in a way that stamps a date.

Section 119.07(1)(f) says that on request, the custodian "shall state in writing and with particularity the reasons for the conclusion that the record is exempt or confidential." Put that line in the request. A denial you asked to be written and particularized is a document, and a document is something you can read out loud.

Ask the agency that runs the cameras where you live for the records of your plate under section 316.0777(4)(b), cite section 119.07(1)(f) for the reasons if they say no, and put a date on it.

1 - Florida Department of Transportation, Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, "Revocation of General Use Permits for Automated License Plate Readers," August 31, 2026. 1 page. Read in the browser from the Department server on September 2, 2026 and re-read on September 10, 2026, unchanged: the memorandum as posted by FDOT. Every quotation above is from that page.

2 - Section 316.0777, Florida Statutes, read in 4 volumes on the Florida Senate statute archive on September 2, 2026 and re-read on September 10, 2026: the 2014 volume, the 2019 volume and the 2025 volume. The 2023 volume is at the same address with the year changed.

3 - Section 316.003(90) and section 334.03(24), Florida Statutes, 2025 volumes, read September 10, 2026 on the same archive.

4 - Florida Department of Transportation, 2025 State Highway System mileage workbook, Summary sheet, State Total row 88: 12,287.004 centerline miles, 46,104.338 lane miles, 373,481.134235 thousand daily vehicle miles traveled. Read and recounted from the file on September 10, 2026.

5 - Florida Department of Transportation, Public Road Mileage 2025 workbook, State Total row 356: 125,157.581 centerline miles, 689,391,401.126 daily vehicle miles traveled. Read and recounted from the file the same day. Note the 2 reports use different units for daily vehicle miles, thousands in one and whole miles in the other, which is where a bad comparison would come from.

6 - Lake County, Florida, commission vote of September 1, 2026, 5-0 to revoke county right-of-way permits. This one is from news coverage, not from the minutes, and it is the only item on this list I have not read the paper for.

7 - State of Michigan contract MA250000000832 with Flock Group Inc. d/b/a Flock Safety, 172 pages, obtained from Michigan DTMB Central Procurement Services under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231, at no charge. Pages 32, 33 and 50 re-extracted from the PDF and read on September 10, 2026.

Every document above is public and you can pull most of them up in a browser tonight. The 1 that took a records request is the Michigan contract, and that request is closed. Nothing in this issue touches anything I have open.

If the work is worth something to you, there is a donate page at donate.magneticnorse.com. The records fees come out of my pocket first and get paid back second, or not at all.

Mags