Lee Schmidt, a retired veteran, wanted to know more about the license plate cameras tracking him in Norfolk, Virginia, where he lives.

He took legal action along with a co-plaintiff and a legal nonprofit to discover that 176 cameras throughout the city tracked his movements 526 times from February 19 to July 2, as stated in a court filing on Monday. This averages out to about four times each day.

“It’s an insanely high number. It was startling,” Schmidt shared with NBC News. “The level of creepiness simply skyrocketed.” These cameras are managed by Flock Safety, a rapidly expanding company that touts itself as “the largest public-private safety network” nationwide. Established in 2017, Flock provides a variety of surveillance tools, such as drones, audio gunshot detectors, and body-worn cameras for police officers. These tools can be integrated with their software products, which include searchable databases and real-time maps.

Flock is relatively new to the automatic license plate readers (ALPR) sector but has quickly become the foremost provider of this technology across the nation. Flock operates on a subscription basis to install and manage ALPR systems, allowing police, businesses, and homeowners associations access to a continuous flow of surveillance data.

The lawsuit is particularly focused on Norfolk’s ALPRs, revealing that the company signed a $2.2 million agreement with the city for these camera systems, lasting through 2027.

Surveillance has become almost omnipresent in the United States, and as technology becomes more ingrained in daily life, citizens are becoming increasingly inquisitive about who is watching and what is being monitored.

Schmidt, one of the two plaintiffs in the case against Norfolk, points out that the city’s police department is among more than 5,000 in the U.S. utilizing ALPRs provided by Flock Safety. Additionally, Flock supplies its technology to over 1,000 commercial enterprises and homeowners associations.

The Norfolk Police Department referred NBC News to the city of Norfolk for comment. A spokesperson for the city said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

For years, ALPRs have quietly blanketed U.S. roads and highways, snapping photos of every car that goes by and storing the time and location in case it later proves helpful for a police investigation. Usually, drivers don’t know how frequently their trips are logged.

But the lawsuit against Norfolk sheds light on just how frequently drivers’ movements are recorded without a warrant for that information.

Flock began installing cameras in Norfolk, home to around 230,000 people, in 2023, and there are now 176 around the city, the filing says. Norfolk’s license data has been accessed around 200,000 times.

Schmidt’s co-plaintiff, Crystal Arrington, a health care worker who lives nearby, was surveilled even more. Her location was logged 849 times between Feb. 19 and July 3, averaging more than six times a day.

One person in the greater Norfolk area, who is mentioned but unnamed in the suit, was logged 14 times over the course of 6 1/2 hours, the filing says.

Schmidt and Arrington are represented by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm that argues in the case that the use of the cameras without a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search that violates the Fourth Amendment. The lawsuit is asking for the cameras to be disabled and all data on the plaintiffs deleted.

A Flock spokesperson said that previous cases, including one from March with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, found that license plate readers do not violate the Fourth Amendment.

“Fourth Amendment case law overwhelmingly shows that LPRs do not constitute a warrantless search because they take point-in-time photos of cars in public and cannot continuously track the movements of any individual,” the spokesperson said.

Some states have been pushing back. Earlier this year, Virginia passed a law that largely prohibits sharing ALPR data outside of the state.

“I think it’s startling to see how many data points just driving your car through one city can add up to,” said Matthew Guariglia⁩, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, who studies the history of surveillance.

“These numbers seem right to me, but it’s still unnerving to get a real concrete idea how ALPRs are essentially mass surveillance,” he told NBC News.

Michael Soyfer, an Institute for Justice attorney representing Schmidt and Arrington, said his clients are representative of Americans in general who are tracked with ALPRs.

“These two people have been extensively surveilled by the city of Norfolk,” he said.

“But I think they’re really just emblematic of a much larger group of people who every day are having their movements tracked by cities all across the country that are using Flock cameras to spy on their own citizens without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” he said.Flock has attracted scrutiny from civil rights groups for its unique features and its collaborations with law enforcement.

Flock gives many law enforcement agencies that use its ALPR services the option to share their data on local drivers with other police departments in their area, the state or even across the country, depending on state and local laws, giving some local police the ability to track drivers across the country.

In 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report warning that Flock’s business model of centralizing ALPR data was creating a single database tracking drivers’ locations “unlike any seen before in American life.”

Privacy and immigration advocates have also warned that Flock’s extensive database of license plate location information can be used in Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations.

According to reporting earlier this year from the tech news publication 404 Media, local police with access to Flock have looked up information to share with ICE.

ICE and its parent agencies do not appear to have a current Flock contract.

A Flock spokesperson pointed to comments from the company’s CEO, Garrett Langley, where he said that it is legal and not uncommon for local law enforcement to choose to call in federal authorities.

“The point is: it is a local decision. Not my decision, and not Flock’s decision,” he wrote.