Four separate bills are now moving through Congress to restrict Flock Safety’s network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), and three of them cite the same source: reporting by 404 Media. Flock’s own count, repeated in a congressional press release this week, puts its camera network at more than 120,000 units scanning 20 billion vehicles a month — a scale that didn’t exist five years ago and that no single federal statute currently governs.
The newest and broadest is the Ban Flock Act, filed Friday by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). Unlike the other bills in play, it doesn’t touch what state and local police can buy. It bars federal agencies, federal officials, or anyone acting on the federal government’s behalf from acquiring, possessing, accessing or using an ALPR or its captured data, including lookups routed through a database. It also cuts off federal grant funding to state and local governments that have ALPR contracts, and lets Americans sue the federal government for violations under the law.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| Flock-Off Act (Massie/Burlison: cuts federal funds for local purchase) | Local police cameras | blocks purchase funds |
| Local police cameras | Flock cloud network (120,000+ cameras, 20bn scans/mo) | |
| Flock cloud network (120,000+ cameras, 20bn scans/mo) | Other agencies' lookups | cross-agency lookup |
| Stop Flock Abuse Act (Hawley: audit logs, 10-day deletion, no facial recognition) | Other agencies' lookups | audit log, approval, deletion |
| Flock cloud network (120,000+ cameras, 20bn scans/mo) | Federal agencies (FBI, ICE) | blocked by Ban Flock Act |
| Ban Flock Act (Sanders/AOC/Merkley: bars federal access + funding) | Federal agencies (FBI, ICE) | |
| FBI RFP for nationwide access | Flock cloud network (120,000+ cameras, 20bn scans/mo) | seeking direct access |
Based on 404 Media, Sanders Senate office, Hawley Senate office, Casar House office
Sanders framed the bill as a response to AI concentration generally: “At a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” he said in the announcement. “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.” Ocasio-Cortez and Merkley issued their own statements calling the camera network’s growth a case of privacy erosion funding corporate profit.
Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you. Flock is always watching.
That quote, from Sanders, is rhetoric, not measurement — Flock’s cameras photograph plates and vehicles passing fixed points, not continuous tracking of a person independent of a car. But the bill’s text points to a documented mechanism, not a hypothetical one. 404 Media reported in May 2025 that local police were running Flock lookups on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which does not have its own authorized access to most local ALPR networks. After that story, Flock cut off other agencies’ ability to search cameras in Illinois, California and Virginia, and added a tool it says blocks impermissible searches in real time. 404 Media separately documented, using data obtained from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that police departments used Flock lookups to monitor “No Kings” protests, and that California police ran a search tagged as an “immigration protest” investigation. The outlet also reported that Flock itself ran a webinar instructing police on using the system to surveil No Kings demonstrators.
The lawmakers’ press release adds two aggregate figures not previously reported by 404 Media: at least 50 law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of misusing Flock cameras, and at least 56 municipalities have deactivated, cancelled or rejected Flock contracts so far in 2026. Neither figure comes with a named source document in the release; they read as Sanders’ office’s own tally rather than a Flock-published number, and are worth checking against whatever list the office eventually discloses.
Hawley’s narrower fix: logs, not a ban
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) took a different route with the Stop Flock Abuse Act, introduced after he chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance.” Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada were invited to send executives to testify and declined; Flock instead sent Hawley a written letter in which it agreed Congress should set a federal framework for the technology and acknowledged adding some guardrails under public pressure, according to CBS News.
Hawley’s bill does not ban federal or local use of ALPRs. It requires a written approval process before each search, with an audit log; forces agencies to delete driver data after 10 days unless tied to an active investigation; bans ALPR networks from incorporating facial recognition; requires data encryption and storage inside the United States; and bars ALPR hardware or software sourced from what the bill calls foreign adversaries. “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 his office’s announcement. At the hearing he put the due-process gap plainly: “It sounds as if it’s treating every citizen in America as if we are criminals, yet without any due process, without any reasonable suspicion, without any articulable suspicion whatsoever.”
A 10-day retention cap matters because the harm in Flock misuse cases documented by 404 Media and others has generally come from how long data sits and how widely it’s searchable, not from the existence of a single plate scan. A camera that deletes a plate after ten days still enables the kind of nationwide cross-jurisdiction search 404 Media found a Texas officer ran on a woman who had self-administered an abortion — the audit-log and approval requirements, not the retention clock, are what would have stopped that lookup, if enforced.
A third bill attacks the money, not the agency
Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), with Representative Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), filed the Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221, on September 2. It takes a third approach: rather than restricting what federal agencies can do, or what police must log, it threatens to cut off federal funds to any state or local government that purchases, installs, operates or upgrades a “covered camera system” — defined broadly enough to include any fixed, mobile or portable device that captures vehicle or plate images and feeds them, via machine learning, to a cloud-based system. Non-compliant recipients would have to reimburse the Treasury in full for the federal funds obligated. The bill carves out two exceptions: ALPR use within one mile of the northern or southern border for interdicting illegal entry, trafficking or drug smuggling, and cameras used solely for toll collection.
Flock pushed back on the funding-cutoff approach specifically, telling Newsweek that “withholding federal funding from the thousands of police departments that rely on license plate reader technology would have real consequences for public safety,” and citing its own 2025 figures: more than one million public-safety investigations supported, a role in 20% of solved cases in partner jurisdictions, and more than 10,000 missing people located. Those numbers are Flock’s own and unaudited; they say nothing about false-positive rates, how many of the one million investigations the camera network was decisive in versus merely cited in, or how the 20%-of-solved-cases figure was computed across jurisdictions that differ in what counts as “solved.”
The FBI wants the access Congress is trying to cut off
The fourth front isn’t a bill at all. Representatives Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), the ranking Democrats on the House Oversight subcommittees covering federal law enforcement and cybersecurity respectively, sent FBI Director Kash Patel a letter on October 2 demanding answers about a Request for Proposals the Bureau issued in May seeking nationwide ALPR access, first reported by 404 Media. The FBI already shares license-plate data with partner agencies through the National Crime Information Center, but the RFP — which Semafor reported is open to bidders including Flock and Motorola Solutions — would give the Bureau direct, near-real-time access to a far larger camera network than it currently reaches through local partners.
The FBI’s plan to obtain direct access to this extensive network of cameras raises the risk of substantial abuses of Americans’ data.
That’s Casar’s language from the letter. He and Brown set an October 16 deadline for the FBI to explain how it would use, store and share the data, and specifically asked whether it could end up shared with ICE or Customs and Border Protection. The FBI is under no legal obligation to answer a letter from the minority party, and Semafor’s framing is that it signals the shape of oversight requests that would follow if Democrats win the House. The letter cites the same 404 Media reporting on the Texas abortion case that shows up in the Ban Flock Act’s rationale — a sign that one outlet’s reporting is now doing the evidentiary work for bills with almost nothing else in common politically.
None of the four efforts has had a committee vote, a markup, or a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate as of this week. The Ban Flock Act and the Flock-Off Act would each, in different ways, choke off money rather than set operating rules; Hawley’s bill would set operating rules without choking off money; the FBI’s RFP process runs on a procurement timeline that doesn’t wait for any of them. A federal judge already ruled one warrantless Flock plate search unconstitutional, under the facts of that case, before Congress acted at all — the next question is whether any of the four bills becomes law before the Bureau’s RFP closes, or whether the courts end up setting the limits that Congress is still only proposing.