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WASHINGTON — The surveillance industry is fighting back. A company that makes automated license-plate readers sued Utah’s government last week over a new law intended to protect drivers’ privacy.

Digital Recognition Network of Fort Worth, Texas, which makes license-plate readers that rapidly scan the tags of passing vehicles, argues that a new state ban on license-plate scanning by private companies infringes on its free-speech rights to collect and disseminate the information it captures, and has effectively put it out of business there.

The case is an early example of pushback as Congress and state legislatures consider proposals to rein in phone-records collection, drones and license-plate readers. At least 14 states — including Colorado — are considering measures that would curb such collections.

Republican state Sen. Todd Weiler, who sponsored the new law, said his proposal gained momentum after legislators discovered police were gathering widespread data from mobile license-plate readers. He said those cameras can be useful, such as recovering stolen cars, but he worried about the privacy implications when organizations store that data indefinitely.

“It’s one thing to take a photo,” he said. “It’s another to take photos every 80th of a millisecond, and then store that data you can later be identified by.”

The Texas company says it’s not a police agency — law enforcement already is exempt from the ban under Utah’s new law — nor can it access in bulk federally protected driver data that personally identifies the letters and numbers it collects from license plates in public. The company said it only wants to find cars that have been stolen or repossessed, not to cull large swaths of data and incriminate people from their travel habits.

“People tend to invoke privacy and suspend judgment and skepticism,” said Michael Carvin of Jones Day, a law firm representing the company and Vigilant Solutions, a license-data network that shares information with authorities to find missing people. “We don’t track people.”

Thursday’s lawsuit marks one of the first times surveillance-technology firms have invoked the First Amendment arguments to defend their businesses.

Some state legislatures have been unhappy with the speed Congress has pushed for reform. Their proposals include a Colorado law that would limit the retention of images from license-plate readers, an Oregon bill that would require “urgent circumstances” to obtain cellphone location data, and a Delaware plan designed to enhance privacy protections for text messages.