Flock Safety just lost highway access in two states in the space of a week.
Florida ordered every agency running Flock's automated license plate readers to pull them off state highways, giving them 30 days to comply. Four days earlier, Texas froze state funding for the same cameras. Both moves came from Republican-led state governments, not from the blue-state privacy advocates who usually lead surveillance pushback. The two decisions landed within a single week of each other.
License plate readers have spread across US roads with little public debate, largely treated as routine traffic infrastructure rather than surveillance tools. Two Republican-run states pulling back in the same week suggests the political cover that let camera networks expand quietly is thinner than vendors assumed. For Flock, a company whose business depends on government contracts, losing highway access in two states in one week is a real revenue problem, not a minor policy footnote.
Whether this is the start of a broader retreat or two unrelated fights that happened to collide on the calendar is the thing worth watching next.