I went to the meeting, and despite strong privacy leanings, came away with cautious support for this. I have a decent fear that "government" will find ways to overuse and misuse this data, and I don't trust their promises of security and audits. However, if my house were robbed or my children were endangered, I'd want the Sheriff to catch the bad guys as quickly as possible.

The basic functionality of this system (as we were assured) is to do a live lookup of a scanned license plate against a database of known plates of interest; if there's a "hit", local law enforcement is immediately notified that Plate XXX was just seen in Town Y. There doesn't (yet) seem to be any massive analysis or data mining of the data.

I hope they do it... and I hope we don't in 10 years regret that this opened a big privacy hole.