Bernie Sanders wants to cut off federal money for license plate surveillance.
On Friday, Sanders introduced The Ban Flock Act in Congress, co-sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Jeff Merkley. The bill would bar federal agencies from using automatic license plate readers, including those made by Flock, the largest ALPR vendor in the US with more than 120,000 cameras scanning roughly 20 billion vehicles a month. State and local governments that keep using the technology would lose federal funding. The bill would also let individuals sue the federal government over ALPR-related privacy violations.
Sanders says Flock has shared data with federal immigration authorities and that police have used its camera network to track activists tied to Palestinian rights protests and the "No Kings" demonstrations. That is the real shift worth noting. ALPR systems were built to catch stolen cars and parking scofflaws, and they are now doubling as a warrantless tracking layer for political activity, a use case no court has signed off on.
Congress has tried to curb facial-recognition tools and data brokers before with little to show for it, so a bill targeting 120,000 cameras already in the ground faces long odds.