Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-NC) introduced legislation Thursday that would require police to get a warrant before searching most of the data collected by Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers.
The bill, H.R. 10822, would require most records to be deleted within 24 hours of collection. It would bar police from searching the system based on political or religious bumper stickers, and it would stop private vendors from selling the data or using it to train artificial intelligence.
Flock cameras photograph every passing vehicle, logging license plates, locations, timestamps, and identifying details like bumper stickers. Police can search that data, including records shared by other agencies, to piece together where someone has been. The company says its network scans roughly 20 billion plates a month.
Harrigan laid out his concern in an interview published Saturday.
“When you consider that these systems track everything that you do, where you work, where your kids go to school, where you even go to church, I think it’s pretty easy to understand why people are concerned.”
“So, that’s an extraordinary amount of information about somebody that the government has that has never committed a crime.”
Documented Abuse Cases
The push for restrictions follows reported misuse of the technology. In Florida, police officer Christopher Goodson was arrested in August after investigators said he searched for his estranged wife’s vehicle 717 times using the Flock database, with some searches allegedly made while he was off duty.
In North Carolina, another officer was accused of using the system 31 times to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife. Harrigan cited that case in a September interview, saying the technology was already being abused.
He said the response needs to mirror an existing surveillance law: “We have to approach this in a 702-like manner.”
“We’ve got to put very, very serious 702-like guardrails on this, where that information comes from, what warrants are required in order to actually query or search the system.”
Harrigan was referencing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a federal surveillance authority that has itself drawn years of criticism for government access to Americans’ communications.
What the Bill Would Do
Beyond the warrant requirement, the legislation would mandate audits and reporting by agencies using the cameras. People subjected to illegal searches could sue for at least $1,000 per violation. States that fail to adopt qualifying protections could lose some federal criminal justice funding.
The bill would still let police use the cameras during legitimate investigations and emergencies. What it would end is routine, warrantless searching of Americans’ movements.
A separate federal case in Oklahoma recently reinforced the constitutional concern: a judge ruled that police violated the Fourth Amendment when they searched a month’s worth of a driver’s movements without a warrant.
