> A difference in degree (of usefulness and speed), not in kind.

IIUC courts have signaled in several cases that this distinction matters to them, which is good, because it's such a vast difference in degree that it arguably does become a difference in kind.

Police require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, or to directly obtain your cell phone location records. Why should access to networked ALPRs that compile an equivalently granular record of your movements be treated any differently? IIUC it was this exact line of reasoning ("detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" data equivalent to GPS tracking, for which a precedent had already been established) that supported the decision that now requires warrants for cell phone data (in Carpenter v. United States). Extending the same logic to networked ALPR data would seem obvious if we had the same SCOTUS.