I'm not interested in engaging in a legalistic argument without considering the societal implications. The enabling part of this on the officer's side is not a

I'm not interested in engaging in a legalistic argument without considering the societal implications. The enabling part of this on the officer's side is not a "massive domestic surveillance dragnet". How else would you describe a state wide system that automatically records the movement of the population and stores it in a database other than dragnet surveillance? And Texas is bigger than many nations. So yes, I would count that as massive. It's OCR tied to a database query. It's automation of a search the officer could already perform, if he could type fast enough. Yes, and that is a tremendously important difference. A computer can log and store every license plate in real time. A single officer cannot do that at scale. The courts have not caught up to this implication of computing technology. This is due to a failure to recognize that a change in quantity can be a change in quality. For example, the occasional overflight to check for drug operations is qualitatively different from surveilling a whole city with areostats and drones. Both involve observation of public areas and are thus currently Constitutional. But one is far more invasive. Your reductionist approach fails to consider any of the factors put forward. There is no conflation of issues. You are simply parroting back obsolete precedent, and refusing to acknowledge the implications of your argument.