Progressives and Republicans Introduce Competing Bills to Rein In Flock Cameras

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have introduced competing legislation to rein in the government’s use of Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers (ALPRs) following widespread abuses by police and intense public backlash to the powerful surveillance technology.

ALPRs allow police to track vehicles and their drivers across expansive areas by using a variety of easily searchable data points from images captured by the cameras. The Ban Flock Act, backed by some Democrats and progressives, would halt federal funding to slow the rise of AI-powered surveillance nationwide. A competing GOP bill creates legal guardrails for police when using ALPR data but would not “ban” license plate surveillance by the federal government.

Introduced on October 2 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), the Ban Flock Act would prevent federal funds from being used to purchase ALPRs, including but not limited to Flock cameras. In order to incentivize a “moratorium” on the use of ALPRs by local police, only state and local governments with laws or policies in place to prohibit the use of ALPRs could continue receiving financial assistance from several federal entities, including from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services.

The bill would also ban the use of both ALPRs and the data gathered by them at the federal level while creating a legal avenue for lawsuits against the federal government over privacy violations.

However, the legislation would not place an outright ban on the use of Flock and similar cameras attached to license plate analytics software, nor would it ban the use of AI-powered surveillance systems by local governments and private actors. The Ban Flock Act would also allow Congress to pass legislation allowing police to use ALPRs for a specific purpose with privacy restrictions, including deleting data after 48 hours. ALPRs used to collect tolls are exempt from the bill.

Speaking at an event in Bakersfield, California, on October 5, Sanders linked Flock cameras to the controversial rapid advances in AI. While the AI systems that enhance ALPR surveillance are not the most controversial frontier models still in development, AI-powered search engines made by Flock Safety and its competitors to analyze data collected by ALPRs make the systems much more powerful.

When asked by Sanders if they had heard of AI data centers and Flock cameras, the crowd booed.

“We are looking at the possibility [of] the evisceration of privacy rights in America,” Sanders said.

Flock Safety is the leading manufacturer of ALPRs along with competitors such as Axon and Motorola Solutions, which some cities are turning to as the Flock brand becomes increasingly controversial. With an estimated 120,000 ALPRs installed nationwide, Flock’s cameras alone record and analyze about 20 billion images of vehicles each month. The anti-surveillance group DeFlock has mapped more than 143,000 ALPR cameras across the lower 48 states.

ALPRs are not new, but the technology has advanced rapidly in recent years and is often integrated with AI, allowing police to effortlessly search for vehicles and people without needing to enter a license plate number. ALPRs capture images of each passing vehicle, recording location, date, and time, as well as the vehicle’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, and then turn these into searchable data points.

For example, when police in Lenexa, Kansas, put a local activist under ALPR surveillance in 2025 after he wrote an op-ed criticizing city officials and was investigated in connection to a petty vandalism case, they were able to easily track his grocery shopping habits and even identify his shoes, according to internal records.

In a statement, Ocasio-Cortez said the widespread integration of AI-powered cameras into everyday life is “unconscionable.”

“Across the country, Big Tech companies like Flock Safety have built a mass surveillance system to harvest Americans’ private and personal data without their consent,” Ocasio-Cortez said on October 2. “AI-powered cameras are keeping track of our every move and weaponizing this data against working people to make record profits.”

While Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are leaning in on the AI angle, the Ban Flock Act would only regulate ALPRs, not AI systems. However, by blocking federal funding for police departments that contract with Flock Safety or other ALPR companies, and by barring federal agencies from accessing the ALPR data, the bill would help incentivize cities to remove the cameras and likely reduce the amount of AI-powered surveillance data flowing from local police to the federal government.

On the GOP side, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) announced that he introduced the Stop Flock Abuse Act on September 30, a bill that would place guardrails on how police use ALPRs. By requiring police to audit ALPR data searches, the bill aims to prevent the sort of scandals that have gone viral in recent months, including so-called “rogue searches” made for illegal, often personal, reasons.

Privacy experts have argued that such audits would do little to prevent abuses. Indeed, local police officers have searched ALPR data to stalk ex-girlfriends and commit other abuses in dozens of cases across the country, generating widespread anger and distrust. AI systems are notorious for making mistakes, and ALPRs have also been involved in dozens of widely publicized wrongful arrests.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri) also introduced a bill on September 2 that would go further than Hawley’s by prohibiting federal funding for ALPRs as well as “cloud services, databases, or data-sharing arrangements” that connect to such camera systems. Like the Ban Flock Act, Massie’s bill seeks to withhold funding for local governments that deploy ALPRs, but it also includes a carveout for ALPRs along the southern border and has attracted only six Republican co-sponsors in the GOP-controlled House. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, is also a co-sponsor.

Massie’s bill would also prohibit federal funding for integrating facial recognition and biometric technology with ALPRs used by police, while the bill introduced by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez would bar the federal government from accessing such data.

However, other AI-powered surveillance cameras that analyze footage instantly would generally remain legal for police and private companies to use — not to mention the advanced surveillance drones that hundreds of police departments have applied to fly. Under Hawley’s bill, federal grant funding for such technology would continue to flow.

“AI-powered cameras produced by Flock and its competitors are tracking and creating digital footprints of everyday Americans — a nightmare for individual liberties unless Congress enacts meaningful rules and accountability,” Hawley said in a statement.

Unlike the Ban Flock Act, Hawley’s bill would not block federal funding for state and local police that use ALPRs or limit access to ALPR data by federal agencies and law enforcement. As Truthout has reported, the Trump administration is using federal funds to promote high-tech surveillance through programs like the lucrative “Model Cities” grants that were recently rejected by New Orleans, Louisiana, and other mid-sized cities where police surveillance is now a hot-button issue.

Instead of pushing cities to deactivate AI-powered Flock cameras — as dozens of cities have chosen to do under mounting pressure from residents — the Hawley bill would rather allow police to keep using the powerful technology within tighter legal limits that may be difficult for Congress to enforce.

In response to a letter from Hawley, Flock Safety said that its ALPR systems store images and data for at least 30 days by default, allowing police to build a profile of an individual driver’s daily movements. Hawley’s bill would require police to delete driver data within 10 days — with exceptions made for “active criminal investigations.” It remains unclear how Congress would enforce such standards on local police.

Unless restricted by local ordinances, police often share ALPR data with other law enforcement agencies, most notoriously Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to assist with President Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation campaign. Despite being marketed as a public safety tool for first responders, ICE and other agencies have accessed ALPR data to track undocumented people thousands of times in violation of local laws and policies.

Law enforcement officials have also pulled ALPR data to investigate pro-Palestine activists and logged searches corresponding to protests against ICE raids as Trump’s surveillance dragnet continues to grow. Flock Safety has reportedly trained law enforcement to use its tools for surveilling people attending “No Kings” protests against Trump, according to 404 Media.

“Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you,” Sanders said in a statement on October 2. “Flock is always watching. We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement.”