On July 25, 2026, Representative Thomas Massie posted on X that he would sponsor legislation to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments deploying automated license plate readers, including those made by Flock Safety. The announcement arrives in the middle of a multi-front backlash that has already stopped deployments in Los Angeles, Monroe County, and Leon County, and follows two other Republican bills targeting the same systems. What makes Massie’s approach distinct is the mechanism: rather than ban the technology or require warrants, it cuts the revenue stream.
The Announcement and Its Context
Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie said he will sponsor a bill that would withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy license plate readers, including Flock cameras. In a separate social media post, Massie wrote that the federal government should not provide security grants to cities and police departments that have turned communities into a version of 1984.
Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days. On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers. In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans. Every federal attempt against Flock so far has failed: Perry’s amendment died in committee, and neither the Burchett nor the Massie-Boebert bill has advanced.
What is notable is not the bill itself, which has no text and no formal introduction date, but the compounding trajectory. Three bills in four months. Municipalities canceling contracts. The Guardian counted 33 incidents of camera damage or destruction across 23 states. Flock has spent nine years building a business model dependent on local government contracts. That model now faces pressure at the revenue layer.
Flock’s Deployment and Federal Subsidy
Flock Safety, based in Atlanta, is the largest such ALPR company and works with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies. The company says its network includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Founded in 2017, Flock announced last March it was valued at $7.5 billion after its latest $275 million funding round. The company operates a subscription model. Cities sign up, pay roughly $50 per household per year and get cameras that federal agencies then access without paying.
Federal money flows into these purchases through multiple channels. The Byrne Justice Assistance Grant and COPS Technology Program are among the most widely used federal funding sources for law enforcement tech. In Michigan City, Indiana, the police department received about $180,000 in federal Community Project Funding to purchase additional Automated License Plate Readers from Flock Safety. That is a direct federal subsidy for a vendor whose business depends on city contracts. Massie’s bill would make that subsidy conditional on not deploying the cameras at all.
The logic is structural, not punitive. Cities adopt Flock cameras partly because federal grants make them affordable. If federal grants become unavailable to cities deploying the cameras, the calculus reverses. A city that spends $50 per household on Flock but loses access to Byrne JAG or COPS grants has not saved money. It has created a budget hole.
Data Access and Jurisdictional Spillover
The controversy around Flock is not only about local surveillance. It is about who else gets access. Starting in mid-2025, state audits and lawsuits found that Flock Safety’s networked database structure let agencies query other agencies’ ALPR data far more broadly than many state laws permitted. The most consequential audit came from Illinois. Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias’s office found U.S. Customs and Border Protection had accessed Illinois ALPR data, violating the state’s 2023 amendment barring immigration-enforcement sharing.
Many Massachusetts police departments have been sharing LPR data collected in their jurisdiction with Flock to be entered into its national database, where it can be accessed by thousands of out-of-state police departments and even federal agencies. Audit logs reviewed by journalists and officials showed local police running searches on behalf of federal agencies, with reasons entered as ICE or immigration. The ACLU’s assessment: the company knew ICE had indirect access the whole time.
This is the mechanism that makes ALPR networks structurally different from isolated cameras. A city installs 20 cameras. Those cameras feed into a vendor-hosted platform. That platform is accessible to every agency with login credentials. A Texas officer can query Massachusetts data. A federal agent can ask a local officer to run a plate. A statute restricting a local department’s own use of ALPR data does not necessarily stop a federal or out-of-state agency from reaching that data through a shared vendor-hosted database if access controls are misconfigured. Several controversies happened for exactly this reason.
What this means is that a local deployment decision is not local. Installing Flock cameras in Monroe County does not create a Monroe County database. It adds Monroe County’s vehicle sightings to a national database that Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and agencies in 48 other states can query. The city pays the subscription. The federal government gets the access.
The Collapse of Regulatory Capture
In several states, local authorities are already reconsidering their decisions regarding Flock. The Los Angeles Police Department suspended its partnership with the company due to concerns over privacy, data sharing, security, and contract terms. LAPD entered a three-year operating agreement with Flock Safety in 2023 covering 138 cameras. The agreement expired on July 11, 2026. LAPD allowed it to lapse while officials addressed concerns involving data ownership, privacy and security. Monroe County in Indiana voted to terminate its agreement early. Leon County in Florida postponed funding for additional cameras following residents’ questions about data collection.
These cancellations are happening without federal legislation. They are the result of public pressure, audit findings, and contract review. What federal legislation would do is institutionalize that pressure. A city council member who wants to cancel a Flock contract currently argues against other council members who point to crime statistics. If Massie’s bill passes, that council member points to the federal funding cliff instead.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims that during protests, including the No Kings movement in 2025, law enforcement accessed license plate databases. That same year, the group reported that Texas police requested Flock data during an abortion investigation initially described as a missing person case. In Milwaukee, internal affairs detectives found an officer secretly used Flock to learn the location of his romantic partner 124 times and that partner’s ex 55 times. The officer agreed to resign and plead guilty. Earlier this month, one of the detectives who had investigated that officer was himself arrested for misusing the Flock system, admitting to using Flock to track two people and to secretly installing a GPS device on one person’s vehicle.
The pattern is not that Flock cameras are inherently misused. The pattern is that a system designed to let any officer query any plate for any reason will be queried by officers for reasons unrelated to investigations. There is no technical barrier. There is only policy, and policy depends on enforcement, and enforcement depends on audit logs being reviewed by someone with authority and incentive to act. Most agencies do not have that. The result is predictable.
Architecture and the Limits of Local Consent
The Flock debate is often framed as a choice between public safety and privacy, as if these were the only variables. A Flock Safety spokesperson told Newsweek that Massie’s bill would have real consequences for public safety, noting that in 2025 the company estimates Flock technology supported more than one million public safety investigations and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people. The spokesperson is correct that the cameras generate investigative leads. The question is whether those leads justify the infrastructure they require.
Unlike red-light or speed cameras, ALPR cameras are not tied to any specific violation. Every plate that passes a live camera is logged, stored for a period set by local policy or statute, and searchable by any officer or agency with query access, whether or not the vehicle is suspected of anything. Automated License Plate Readers are surveillance systems that use high-speed cameras to capture images of license plates, convert them into searchable vehicle location data, and aggregate this information into centralized databases. Police and private companies can search these databases to track vehicles across time and location, often without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing.
This is the architectural problem. A system that logs every vehicle builds a location history for every driver. That history is queryable. It is not local. It is shared across jurisdictions. At minimum, this dragnet surveillance means warrantless tracking of everyone on the road. At worst, it means a digital police state wherein law enforcement officials in far-flung jurisdictions can track protesters, political opponents, immigrants, patients, and others not suspected of any crime.
The opposing coalition is unusual: the left objects to ICE access to local cameras, the right objects to warrantless dragnet tracking of every driver, and the AP notes it is one of the few issues on which a divided country has found common ground. That coalition is fragile, but it exists because the architecture of ALPR surveillance crosses ideological lines. Immigration enforcement and protest tracking are different use cases. They rely on the same database.
Email shares a similar problem. If a sender routes mail through a provider that logs metadata and makes it available to law enforcement without a warrant, the decision affects everyone in the correspondence chain. The same principle applies to license plates. A city that opts into Flock does not only surveil its own residents. It contributes data that agencies elsewhere can query. Consent at the municipal level does not extend to jurisdictional spillover.
There are email providers that do not log metadata, that operate over Tor, that accept cryptocurrency, and that do not respond to requests for data they do not have. Open-source post-quantum infrastructure such as PQCServer, released under AGPL-3.0, illustrates this principle in practice. These tools exist because some users recognize that architecture determines what is possible, and that possibility determines what will eventually happen. A system that can be queried will be queried. A database that can be shared will be shared. The question is whether the law treats these inevitabilities as features or bugs.
Conclusion
Massie’s bill has not been introduced. It has no cosponsors, no text, and no floor time. It may die in committee like the others. What it signals is that the opposition to ALPR networks is moving from municipal councils to federal appropriations. If that shift succeeds, cities will face a choice: deploy the cameras and lose federal grants, or decline the cameras and keep the grants. That is not a ban. It is a budget constraint. The result is the same.
The structural question is whether surveillance infrastructure should be subsidized by the jurisdictions it monitors. The answer, increasingly, appears to be no.