A private citizen could take the photos and store them on a computer. A private citizen could not easily run them against license plate databases at scale and

A private citizen could take the photos and store them on a computer. A private citizen could not easily run them against license plate databases at scale and resolve the identity of the car's owner to the name of a real person. A private citizen could not then take that real person's name and run it against LE databases to determine whether the registered owner of the car were a known arsonist, terrorist suspect, felon, firearms owner, or campaign contributor to whomever. If the battle is to be fought and won, I would be surprised if "taking pictures" were the act found to be unconstitutional. I would be slightly less surprised if "storing every bit of metadata possible on every human possible" were found to be unconstitutional, and that storage / reconciliation should likely be the targets of our efforts.