On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he’ll soon sponsor “a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments” that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words “don’t flock me.”
Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie’s bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock’s business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.
Third Strike In A Week
Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.
On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers – Flock is named explicitly – along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett’s pitch: “We gotta ban these dadgum things.”
Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn’t over: “STOP THE FLOCK.”
In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert’s framing: the government is building a “digital footprint of your entire life” without a warrant or probable cause.
The Company That Swears It Isn’t Tracking You
Flock Safety is the Atlanta company, founded in 2017, whose cameras photograph every passing vehicle and log not just the plate but the “vehicle fingerprint” – make, model, color, dents, roof racks, bumper stickers – into a searchable national network queried by thousands of law enforcement agencies. The install base has now crossed 100,000 cameras, a rollout ZeroHedge has chronicled as the economics of the surveillance state: one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the country was blanketed.
Last September we noted the coming collision between the license-plate-reader gold rush and the public. Fast forward to June of this year, security researcher Benn Jordan found dozens of Flock cameras streaming publicly, documented AI features that zoom in on and follow individual people, and showed that plotting the stored data amounts to putting a month-long GPS tracker on a car. Flock’s response has been that the system captures discrete points in time rather than “tracking” anyone, though those points can be plotted on a map to reconstruct movements.