The government has been quietly watching every American who drives a car.
A Republican congressman decided enough was enough and went after the cameras doing the watching.
And the whole Flock surveillance network just got put on notice with a bill that could change everything.
What the FLAFO Act Would Actually Do
US Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) introduced legislation to bar the federal government from buying, operating, or accessing Flock Safety cameras without a judicial warrant. Steube’s bill, dubbed the Facilitating Liberty and Accountability for Flock Observations Act — the FLAFO Act — aims to crack down on warrantless surveillance using automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, such as Flock Safety cameras.
The legislation prohibits federal agencies from purchasing, leasing, operating, accessing, or sharing data with networked ALPR surveillance systems without a judicial warrant, and it conditions Department of Justice federal grant funding for state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies on the adoption of substantially similar privacy regulations.
That second piece matters more than people realize. Tying DOJ grant money to warrant requirements puts real pressure on local police departments that have been rolling out these camera networks with essentially no oversight and no public debate.
“The Fourth Amendment is not optional,” Steube said. “Americans should not be tracked everywhere they drive without a warrant.”
Steube added: “Flock Safety’s surveillance network is too expansive, and we have seen several instances across the country where this technology is too easily abused. The FLAFO Act limits warrantless surveillance by ALPR systems because the government has no business tracking law-abiding Americans.”
“There’s cameras everywhere, people know that, but if law enforcement has the ability to monitor the comings and goings of citizens, I think that’s wrong. I mean, we’re not the CCP, we’re not 1984 and an Orwellian society, and Americans have rights,” Steube told Fox News Digital.
The Sarasota Arrest That Set This Off
Steube didn’t introduce this bill in a vacuum. He pointed directly at what happened in his own district as proof that the system gets abused the moment it exists.
Sarasota officer Cory Waiters was arrested in August 2026 and charged with felony official misconduct after an internal audit found he had allegedly searched a single license plate more than 350 times in the Flock system, according to Fox 13 Tampa Bay.
The department opened its internal investigation after getting an email from a USA Today reporter. According to a probable cause affidavit, the reporter had examined publicly available Flock Safety audit logs and found that about 335 queries were associated with Waiters and a specific vehicle between May 20, 2025, and July 17, 2025.
Think about that for a moment. The public only found out because a journalist dug through audit logs. The department didn’t catch it on its own.
Waiters faces two felony charges and one misdemeanor, including an offense involving computers, computer systems, networks or electronic devices, and official misconduct.
The Sarasota case was not isolated. Just days before that scandal broke, another Florida officer was arrested for a nearly identical crime. Fox 13 noted: “This comes after a Haines City police officer was charged last week with misusing Flock cameras to track his estranged ex-wife.”
A September 2026 Washington Post investigation documented at least 69 instances across the United States where police officials were accused, charged, or convicted of misusing Flock or other license plate reader systems for personal reasons, including stalking ex-partners.
Sixty-nine documented cases. And those are just the ones that got caught.
A Surveillance Machine That Was Never Designed With Limits
Flock Safety is the industry leader, accounting for more than 80 percent of ALPR systems operating in the US. Automated license plate reader technology has expanded from localized tools for identifying criminal activity into large-scale surveillance mechanisms capable of aggregating sensitive location information across jurisdictions.
By using artificial intelligence and machine learning, covered ALPR systems aggregate vehicle data into centralized databases, enabling detailed tracking of individuals’ movements, associations, and daily routines without individualized suspicion.
No warrant. No judge. No individualized suspicion. The camera logs where you were, when you were there, what direction you were heading, and it shares that data across agencies — and in many cases with federal agencies — without the driver ever knowing it happened.
ACLU data published in September 2026 shows that less than 1% of all vehicle license plates captured by ALPR networks are connected to active criminal investigations, warrants, or stolen vehicle reports, meaning the overwhelming majority of captured plates belong to people never suspected of any crime.
So the government is building detailed movement profiles on essentially every driver in any area where Flock cameras operate. That is mass surveillance. Full stop. The fact that it happens quietly through a private vendor — rather than through an overt government program — doesn’t make it any less of a Fourth Amendment problem.
An August 2026 audit by the Roseville, California Police Department, analyzing nearly 1,500 Flock camera reports, revealed a 71% failure rate in AI license plate character recognition, causing the system to frequently mistake plate digits and flag law-abiding drivers as operating stolen vehicles.
A 71% failure rate. The system that supposedly keeps communities safe is misidentifying the plates of innocent drivers the majority of the time — and those misidentifications can trigger a traffic stop, a weapon drawn, a situation that escalates badly.
What Steube’s Bill Gets Right
The FLAFO Act isn’t anti-law enforcement. Steube isn’t arguing that police can never look at a license plate camera. He’s arguing that they need to get a warrant to do it — the same constitutional standard that applies to searching a home, a car, or a phone.
Federal agencies should not provide support or authorization for surveillance practices that infringe upon constitutionally protected civil liberties. The FLAFO Act closes that gap by prohibiting federal agencies from purchasing, leasing, operating, accessing, or supplying data to covered ALPR systems without a judicial warrant, while preserving limited exceptions for immediate threats to life, safety, and national security.
That’s a reasonable line. A genuine emergency — an active kidnapping, a known terror suspect on the move — can justify expedited action. But the default position of logging every American’s movements every day without any suspicion, any warrant, or any judicial review isn’t a public safety tool. It’s a surveillance state operating through a subscription service.
The question worth sitting with is how these systems got deployed across so many communities with so little public debate. Local city councils approved contracts with Flock Safety without most residents ever knowing the cameras went up, what data gets retained, how long it gets stored, or which outside agencies can pull it. That’s not transparency. That’s a surveillance expansion through bureaucratic back channels, and the communities footing the bill through local budgets and higher insurance premiums on misidentified drivers never got a real vote on any of it.
Flock has announced some additional safeguards in response to the wave of abuse cases — requiring officers to document searches with case codes and flagging unusual search patterns. By the end of this year, the company says all law enforcement customers will be required to use tools that flag unusual searches, and it will cut off access when activity appears suspicious. Flock will also require officers to document their searches with case codes. Corporate self-regulation announced in response to bad publicity isn’t the same thing as a constitutional warrant requirement enforced by an independent judge.
And what Steube’s bill does — tying DOJ grant funding to warrant compliance at the state and local level — is exactly the kind of structural pressure that actually changes institutional behavior. Agencies that rely on federal grants to fund their operations will pay attention to strings attached to that money. That’s the lever that works.
The FLAFO Act now moves to House committees for initial consideration, joining a growing list of local and federal actions responding to Flock’s expanding footprint.
Whether it advances depends on whether enough members of Congress take the Fourth Amendment seriously enough to vote for it. The warrant requirement isn’t a radical idea. It’s what the Constitution always required. Steube’s bill just insists that the government actually follow it.
Sources: Daily Caller; Congressman Greg Steube press release, steube.house.gov; Fox News Digital; Florida Voice News; WFLA Tampa Bay; Hoodline; CBS Austin; Tampa Bay 28