New Bill Targets License Plate Surveillance

Millions of Americans are being quietly tracked on public roads by Flock cameras that police and federal agents can search without a warrant, and now Congress is finally moving to confront it.

Story Snapshot

Rep. Keith Self has introduced the PRIVACY Act to force federal agents to get a warrant before pulling data from Flock and other local camera systems.
Audits and lawsuits say federal agencies have already tapped into Flock’s nationwide network for warrantless, dragnet surveillance of drivers.
Cities and states across the country are starting to push back, adding warrant rules and canceling contracts over privacy and immigration concerns.
Court rulings and new Supreme Court decisions suggest long-term location tracking may soon be treated as a Fourth Amendment search.

Keith Self’s PRIVACY Act Targets Federal Use of Local Camera Data

Republican Congressman Keith Self of Texas has introduced the Protecting Rights in Video and Equipment Acquired Discovery, or PRIVACY Act, in the House of Representatives. His bill would require federal law enforcement agencies to get a warrant from a judge before accessing or querying surveillance data collected by state and local systems, including Flock’s automatic license plate readers. Self says this is about defending Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that mass access to location data without a warrant crosses a constitutional line.

Self’s move comes as Flock’s camera network has spread to tens of thousands of devices nationwide, many paid for by local taxpayers. Reports and advocacy groups say federal agencies have used “national lookup” features in Flock’s system to search across local networks, sometimes without the knowledge or consent of the local departments that own the cameras. Critics see the PRIVACY Act as a late but necessary step to close what they describe as a back door that lets federal agents piggyback on local systems to watch ordinary Americans.

Evidence of Warrantless, Nationwide Tracking Feeds Privacy Fears

Flock’s cameras capture each vehicle that passes, recording license plate numbers, car details, and sometimes bumper stickers or other identifiers. That information can be stored for weeks, then searched across jurisdictions by thousands of police departments, typically without a warrant or court order. A civil liberties lawsuit backed by the Institute for Justice argues that a citywide network of Flock cameras makes it “functionally impossible” to drive anywhere without having your movements stored in a database that enables warrantless surveillance of every move.

A report from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights found United States Border Patrol agents gained apparent “back door” access to local Flock networks in Washington state that did not explicitly authorize federal searches. The group said Flock audits revealed multiple paths by which federal agents could tap local license plate data, raising due process and privacy concerns for residents who were never told their daily drives might be scanned by immigration enforcement. This kind of quiet data sharing feeds the growing belief on both the left and right that federal agencies use new tools first and ask constitutional questions later.

Cities, States, and Courts Begin to Push Back on Mass Surveillance

Some local governments have decided the tradeoff is not worth it. At least dozens of cities, including college towns like Cambridge, Eugene, and Santa Cruz, have deactivated Flock cameras or ended contracts over fears of immigration surveillance and mass tracking. In Washington state, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 6002, sharply limiting how agencies can use automated license plate readers and requiring a “valid, court-issued probable cause warrant” for police to get data collected by private entities. The same law bars using these cameras for immigration enforcement and bans monitoring at places like schools, churches, and health clinics.

Courts are also starting to draw lines. A Washington judge ruled that Flock images are public records, not secret law‑enforcement files, making them subject to public records requests and shining more light on how the cameras are used. In Norfolk, Virginia, a federal judge said the city’s Flock cameras do not yet invade privacy because they do not fully reconstruct people’s routines, but warned that this answer “not today” might change as the technology grows more powerful. Meanwhile, another Virginia court has held that long‑term collection of location data from a dense Flock network does amount to a search that requires a warrant.

Supreme Court Rulings Put Flock in the Constitutional Crosshairs

Recent Supreme Court decisions have raised the stakes for Flock and similar systems. In a major case on geofence warrants, the Court held that police requests for bulk cell phone location data from everyone in a certain area count as a Fourth Amendment search, so they generally require a warrant based on probable cause. Experts say that ruling recognizes a reasonable expectation of privacy in a person’s movements over time, even when some of that data passes through private technology companies.

What the Flock? Camera data not secured. Rep. Keith Self is doing something about it.

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Legal scholars argue this logic could apply to Flock’s nationwide license plate database, which lets officers query a driver’s past travels across many cities without judicial oversight. So far, many appellate courts have treated single license plate photographs on public roads as outside the warrant requirement, comparing them to an officer visually checking a plate. The open question is whether dense, long‑term tracking powered by Flock’s artificial intelligence, shared widely with federal agencies, crosses the line into the kind of dragnet surveillance the Supreme Court has started to reject.