Data from local police license plate cameras, including ones sold by Flock and Axon, is being pooled on federal servers through an anti-drug grant program that Congress created in 1988 and the White House still runs, 404 Media reported on Wednesday, citing public records and court documents.
The program, High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, or HIDTA, pays for 33 regional centers that together cover all 50 states. According to the records, the centers collect plate reads from city and county cameras and make them searchable by federal, state and local agencies, including agencies with no contract of their own with a camera company. Some of the data moves on to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s National License Plate Reader Program. The article called the setup “an end-around for federal law enforcement,” and Jason Koebler, the 404 Media co-founder who wrote it, posted the findings on X.
New: Through a series of complex agreements with cities, the White House built a massive license plate camera database accessible to the feds. The program aggregates data across license plate companies (Flock, Axon, more) & is searchable by many agencies:
Read alongside state policies, city council agendas, police manuals, a D.E.A. privacy filing and the government’s own court arguments, the records describe a system that is older than the administration now promoting it and that sits mostly outside the controls cities have used to rein in Flock. The D.E.A. began its national plate database in 2008. The Houston HIDTA’s contract for a database spanning several camera brands went before a Texas city council in May 2024. Since January 2025, the Trump White House has honored the Houston center for its plate reader platform and given the HIDTA program what it calls the largest funding allocation in the program’s history.
The documents also put limits on the alarm. In Georgia, where an agreement with a HIDTA is a written condition of putting cameras on state roads, Flock says HIDTA users can see how many times a plate was captured, when it was last seen and whose camera saw it, but not the photos or their locations. What a city can do depends on where its cameras stand, which vendor runs them and which state it is in. The number of cameras makes the question bigger. One researcher has mapped roughly 300,000 Flock cameras alone, more than the company says it has.
How the data moves
Georgia’s requirement comes from a Georgia State Patrol policy. A Flock page for Georgia agencies tells departments that if they install or operate cameras on Georgia Department of Transportation right of way, they “must sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with HIDTA to remain in compliance with the new GSP policy.” The page gives no date for the policy. Gwinnett County’s police department tells residents that the state “requires data captured by Flock cameras installed on state routes to be shared with the Georgia State Patrol,” which it calls the only exception to the county’s control of its data.
Flock’s page also describes what passes through. Once an agency signs, users of what Flock calls the HIDTA National LPR system can query a plate and get back the number of matches in Flock’s database, the time of the most recent one and the name of the agency that owns the camera. “Flock LPR reads, their location, and associated vehicle images are not available through this interface,” the page says. Flock and Axon did not respond to 404 Media’s requests for comment.
Brunswick, on the Georgia coast, ran into the rule this month. The city had approved a police camera network costing about $1 million, Action News Jax reported, and 404 Media found it could not switch on its Axon plate readers without an agreement with the Atlanta-area HIDTA covering “the sharing of information contained within their electronic data systems, including but not limited to: Automated License Plate Readers.” The Brunswick News described the agenda item as an agreement with the state transportation department and cited a memo from Police Chief Angela Smith saying City Hall had to sign. The public record does not make clear whether the two accounts describe one document or two.
Houston is where the pieces meet. The Houston HIDTA, one of the five original centers designated in 1990, paid $306,800 to a company called Recruitful LLC “for creating and maintaining an LPR database,” 404 Media reported. A Baytown City Council agenda for May 23, 2024 listed an ordinance authorizing that agreement. The contract’s statement of work says the system would “migrate” data held by local agencies into one database searchable across Flock, Axon, ELSAG and Vigilant cameras, and it requires that outside integrations, Flock’s among them, keep working in the new system. A login portal for the national HIDTA plate system, seen by 404 Media, runs through Houston.
Agencies far from Texas use the Houston server. The Wichita Police Department’s plate reader policy says data from its ELSAG readers is uploaded to the Houston HIDTA server in real time and stored there for no more than three years. In North Carolina, the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office refused a public records request for its Flock data, saying “all data is kept on the Federal Houston-HIDTA database” and could not be shared with the public.
The D.E.A. described the next link in a privacy impact assessment approved Dec. 20, 2024. Contributing agencies send plate data to servers kept by regional hubs under agreements “which stipulate that this data may be shared with the NLPRP system,” the agency wrote, and it said it was seeking to connect with a Customs and Border Protection camera network. Its own risk assessment said the national system:
risks an over-collection of the personally identifiable information of every license plate passing each LPR camera location, including a large number of images of travel of law-abiding drivers not relevant to criminal investigations.
The same assessment says the agency’s coverage “is not extensive enough to enable comprehensive nationwide tracking surveillance” and that records no one views become inaccessible after 90 days, IBTimes reported. The D.E.A. told 404 Media that it had no jurisdiction over HIDTA and declined to comment, even on how its own plate system interacts with the program. Customs and Border Protection did not respond.
A program no one claims
Congress created the program in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, signed Nov. 18, 1988, which set up the Office of National Drug Control Policy and let its director designate high intensity drug trafficking areas. The first five, in 1990, were New York, Los Angeles, South Florida, Houston and the Southwest border, treated as gateways for drugs entering the country. By 1998 there were 20, and annual funding had grown from $25 million to about $162 million, the General Accounting Office reported that year.
The Obama White House counted 28 HIDTAs covering “a little over 65.5 percent of the U.S. population.” There are now 33. Each is directed by an executive board, and the government has used that structure in court. In a recent filing in a lawsuit by a man seeking HIDTA records about himself, the D.E.A.’s lawyers argued that the agency could not be made to produce them:
At the local level, the HIDTAs are directed and guided by Executive Boards composed of an equal number of regional Federal and non-Federal (state, local, and tribal) law enforcement leaders... Accordingly, DEA does not create, possess, maintain, or control HIDTA program records, nor does it store such records in any of its systems of records.
The Obama administration described HIDTA as a grant program made up of law enforcement members rather than as an entity, 404 Media reported, yet the centers sign agreements with cities in their own names. The Office of National Drug Control Policy did not respond to 404 Media. It was not clear which agency, if any, would answer a federal records request for the data a city sends to a HIDTA.
The Houston center has also tried to limit what the public can learn from the cameras’ audit logs. In December 2025 it issued an officer safety bulletin about HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a site that publishes Flock audit logs obtained through records requests, and an F.B.I. agent in Atlanta forwarded it on Dec. 11, according to a post by the site’s creator, Cris van Pelt. The bulletin told Flock users to keep the stated reason for each search “as vague as permissible” and to consider excluding “the states/agencies that release their audit logs.” Mr. van Pelt, whose records requests supplied many of the documents in 404 Media’s article, said the HIDTA arrangement “bypasses democratic processes entirely.”
The databases before this one
The D.E.A.’s plate program dates to 2008, according to agency documents the American Civil Liberties Union obtained and published on Jan. 26, 2015, the same day The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was building a national database to track vehicles in real time. An undated slide in the ACLU’s release put the database at more than 343 million records. Customs and Border Protection fed in “nearly 100 percent of land border traffic,” more than 793.5 million plates between May 2009 and May 2013, and systems in San Diego and Imperial Counties and New Jersey contributed as well.
The agency had recently cut retention of data that matched no alert to six months, the ACLU wrote. Another email released by the group, from April 2009, showed the D.E.A.’s Phoenix office planning plate reader operations at gun shows with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which the D.E.A. said were only proposed and never carried out. On Jan. 28, 2015, Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy, the leaders of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder about the program.
The drug policy office has paid for this kind of pooling before. Hemisphere, a program in which AT&T searched its call records for police, was revealed by The New York Times in 2013. In a Nov. 20, 2023, letter, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, wrote that the White House pays AT&T to give law enforcement agencies “the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records,” that the office had funded it since 2009 and that it had been renamed Data Analytical Services. Jeramie Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Center at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told 404 Media the office “has apparently done a similar thing for license plate reader data.”
The White House’s part
On April 2, the drug policy office named the Houston HIDTA its HIDTA of the Year, crediting its work “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.” The release said the center’s partners seized more than $1 billion in drugs in 2025, including 25 metric tons of cocaine.
A month later, the administration’s 2026 National Drug Control Strategy gave plate readers a text box of their own, saying they “are a critical technological tool for domestic drug interdiction, acting as a significant force multiplier for law enforcement on our nation’s highways.” Regina LaBelle, who led the office as acting director in 2021, wrote on her Substack that the plate reader section repeated a strategy from the Biden administration’s 2024 plan.
On July 9, the White House announced $277 million for the 33 HIDTAs and called it “the largest investment in the HIDTA Program’s history.” The release’s table labels the $277,491,415 as the fiscal 2026 base allocation, and the release does not mention plate readers. “This funding will strengthen the HIDTA Program’s relentless crusade against illicit drugs,” said Sara Carter, whom the release identifies as the drug czar.
What the record supports
The 404 Media account makes three claims that the wider record lets a reader test: that cities are forced to share, that this is the Trump administration’s doing and that HIDTA receives what the cameras collect.
The first holds in Georgia, with a qualifier. The condition comes from a state police policy tied to state roads, not from a federal grant, and Flock’s page says it “applies only to LPR cameras located within the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) Right-of-Way (ROW).” That leaves less room than it sounds. Brunswick’s 2024 request for proposals said poles in its project not owned by Georgia Power stood in the state’s right of way and needed state permits. On Hacker News, one reader saw a familiar mechanism in the story.
This is dark side of the “grants with strings” taxes->federal->state->local money flow that the overwhelmingly prevailing sentiment here is to cheer for when it’s being used in ways people like.
The Georgia documents fit that description only in part. In Brunswick’s case the string was tied by the state, through its control of roadside poles, not by a federal grant to the city. Federal money pays for the hubs that receive the data, and the White House’s July allocation went to the HIDTAs.
The administration’s role is real but recent. The D.E.A. program began in 2008, the Recruitful agreement went before the Baytown council in May 2024 and the privacy assessment was approved in December 2024, all under earlier administrations. What has changed since January 2025 is open sponsorship: an award, a record allocation and a national strategy that names plate readers as a tool.
The third claim depends on the vendor and the hub. Through Flock’s Georgia interface, by the company’s account, a HIDTA user learns that a plate was seen, when and by whose camera, which is enough to send an investigator to the owning agency but not a copy of the read. The Houston contract describes migrating data into a central database, and Wichita’s policy describes uploading reads to it. The records do not show how many agencies send full reads rather than match counts.
The case for the system rests on results. The drug policy office credits the Houston center with dismantling or disrupting 138 trafficking and money laundering organizations in 2025, though its release does not say what part plate data played. Brian Shab, the police chief in Watsonville, Calif., told his City Council last month that without the cameras “there will be crimes that go unsolved,” Santa Cruz Local reported.
What cities have tried
Flock’s main answer to the backlash has been a switch. After an Illinois audit found that Customs and Border Protection had searched Illinois cameras, Garrett Langley, the company’s chief executive, wrote in an August 2025 blog post that “all ongoing federal pilots have been paused.” In January the company added a setting that shuts off federal sharing, and a later post by Mr. Langley said local agencies would be undiscoverable by federal law enforcement by default. The post sorts users into “federal law enforcement” and “local agency.” It does not mention HIDTA, fusion centers or task forces.
San Francisco shows how data can travel around such a switch. A police audit in May found that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a fusion center, had queried the city’s Flock network on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies, 299 improper searches over about a year, KQED reported. Police Chief Derrick Lew said analysts at the Western States Information Network, a federally funded intelligence group, ran searches for agencies including the D.E.A., the Internal Revenue Service and the A.T.F. He cut off the center’s access, and Mayor Daniel Lurie moved this month to cut the city’s retention from a year to 30 days.
Mr. van Pelt, writing in June about the San Francisco audit, argued that the detour was the system working as built.
Laundering the data through a fusion center does not change that. That is the whole shell game.
Watsonville pulled the other main lever on Sept. 22. Its council voted 5 to 2 to cut its Flock cameras to 20 from 37, keep data for seven days instead of 30 and stop sharing with other jurisdictions. “For me, the dangers of this tool far outweigh anything that we could possibly save,” said Councilwoman Vanessa Quiroz-Carter. IBTimes, writing about the HIDTA records, said limits like Watsonville’s may not reach copies already held on a HIDTA server.
Other places have ended contracts. At least 30 localities deactivated Flock cameras or canceled contracts from the start of 2025 to February, NPR reported, among them Flagstaff, Ariz., Cambridge, Mass., Eugene, Ore., and Santa Cruz, Calif. Jacob Sullum of Reason counted 157 local governments that had dropped or declined to renew plate reader contracts, a small share of the roughly 7,000 agencies using Flock. On Hacker News, a reader argued for going further than any of these steps.
There’s no such thing as friendly neighborhood mass surveillance. We need to treat data as a bad thing to have. All data that is collected can be abused.
The documents bear out a narrower version of that view. Deleting data shortens only the copies a city controls. Wichita’s policy allows three years on the Houston server, and Georgia law lets agencies keep plate data for 30 months. Short of new state law, the records point to two ways for a city to keep its reads out of a HIDTA: keep cameras off the roads where a rule like Georgia’s applies, or not run them at all.
States, Congress and courts
State law sets the outer bounds. California already bars agencies from sharing plate data with federal and out-of-state agencies, which is why the San Francisco searches were improper. A bill by State Senator Sabrina Cervantes that would have barred contracts giving federal and out-of-state police default access died without a final vote this year. “It’s unfortunate that Senate Bill 1013 did not get the chance to be voted on before the deadline passed,” she said in a statement. Washington’s Driver Privacy Act, signed in March, caps retention at 21 days and bans using the readers for immigration enforcement. A scorecard from the Policing Project at New York University School of Law found in August that 26 states have no plate reader law and that no state meets all seven of its standards.
In Congress, Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, introduced the Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221, on Sept. 2 with Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri, and co-sponsors including Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. It would bar federal money for plate readers and biometric cameras, with exceptions near the borders and for toll collection. Mr. Massie announced it on X.
Federal taxpayers should not be forced to fund the surveillance state.
We just introduced HR 10221, the Flock-Off Act, to prohibit the use of federal funds for real-time surveillance cameras.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, held a Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Sept. 23 titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” The chief executives of Flock, Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada were invited and did not appear, WFSB reported. “We are a long way from a simple automated license plate reader,” Mr. Hawley said. Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said, “Congress needs to lead the way.”
On Sept. 30, the day the HIDTA records were published, Mr. Hawley introduced the Stop Flock Abuse Act, which would bar local governments from selling plate data, require audit logs and require deletion after 10 days unless the data is linked to an active investigation, KCUR reported. The report did not say whether the bill would reach federal agencies. In the courts, a challenge to Norfolk, Va.’s Flock cameras is before the Fourth Circuit after a federal judge ruled for the city in January, while writing that plate reader surveillance “could become too intrusive” at some point.
In Connecticut, a law limiting police to 21 days of retention for images not part of an active investigation took effect on Thursday, and under its sharing rules, WFSB reported, vague reasons like “investigation” are no longer enough. In Georgia, where a HIDTA agreement is the price of a camera on a state road, the law allows plate data to be kept for 30 months.