The Oklahoma State Capital

The travels of Guthrie residents may have been the subject of warrantless surveillance by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) as far back as 2023.

The revelation comes courtesy of the startup publication The Sooner Sentinel, via its platform on Substack.

On Thursday, The Sentinel published a comprehensive listing of agencies, including the ATF, that have access to conduct searches of Guthrie's traffic, as monitored by an array of approximately 12 surveillance scanners.

The scanners, approved, albiet with some hesitation, by the Guthrie City Council in 2022, establish a biometric profile of each passing vehicle. The data is sent to Amazon Web Services servers, where Guthrie City Hall appears to allow nearly 100 government agencies, including the ATF, to search, potentially download, and retain that data for an unknown period of time on their own separate computer systems.

In a 2022 meeting, Guthrie Ward II City Councilman Brian Bothroyd theorized that the scans could allow Guthrie Police to conduct a door-to-door dragnet of residents until the police identified the owner of a scanned vehicle.

The Sentinel's publisher, former Logan County Commissioner turned citizen journalist Marven Goodman, discovered the sharing policy after filing an open records request with City Hall.

The sharing policy was only briefly referenced during the Council's deliberations on the proposal in 2022. Its extent appears to have likely been unclear to council members, including at least two who expressed concern about the idea. Goodman is working to determine whether council members were fully aware of the sharing arrangement or if they had been informed of the ATF's access.

In the fall, Goodman played a key role in an interim study conducted by the Oklahoma House of Representatives. He was recognized to testify on the matter and revealed Guthrie's use of the scanning devices on State Highway 33. The state's Department of Transportation does not have the authority to permit such devices on state highways, and within hours of his testimony before the committee, the devices were removed.

Goodman's disclosure comes just two days after outgoing Logan County Commissioner Charlie Meadows used his final county commission meeting to criticize Goodman, who was covering the meeting. Meadows suggested Goodman may run for commissioner and said it would be a "huge mistake" for voters to elect Goodman over Sharpton, a longtime Meadows ally.

For the second consecutive meeting, Goodman was the only media representative covering the commission meeting, as Guthrie News Page's Chris Evans was not in attendance.

MORE: "Find Your Guy or Gal": Guthrie City Council Gives It's Approval to Controversial New Surveillance System of Local Citizens.