Mountain View, California discovered 250 unauthorized police agencies had searched its traffic cameras 600,000 times – without the city's knowledge.
That wasn't a glitch – that was the system working exactly as designed.
Now two Republican lawmakers have seen what is behind that camera on every American's street corner – and they are not staying quiet about it.
Flock Safety Cameras Are Tracking Every Driver in America Without a Warrant
Flock Safety's AI surveillance cameras are everywhere now.
Over 75,000 of them are mounted on poles in neighborhoods, on bike trails, at school entrances, at gyms, and even inside children's gymnastics rooms.
Every time a car passes one, it captures the license plate, the vehicle's make, model, color, bumper stickers, and scratches – then uploads that "Vehicle Fingerprint" to a centralized cloud database accessible to law enforcement agencies across the country.
No warrant required.
One retired Navy veteran in Norfolk, Virginia – a man not accused of any crime – had his car logged by Flock cameras 475 times in just four months.
He never knew it was happening.
The database isn't limited to local cops, either.
In Illinois, the state launched a formal audit after it emerged that Flock had quietly allowed the federal government to access Illinois license plate cameras through a "pilot program" – one that Flock's own leadership claimed they knew nothing about.
Boebert and Massie Introduce the Surveillance Accountability Act
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky had seen enough.
He and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act – legislation that would require federal and local government agencies to obtain a probable cause warrant before conducting any surveillance on American citizens.
The bill would specifically ban the use of automated license plate readers like Flock's cameras to build persistent location databases without a court order.
"For years, the federal government has treated the Fourth Amendment like a suggestion," Massie said at the announcement.
"They'll know when you drop your kids off at school," Massie said. "They'll know if you went to a gun range. They'll know when you went to the doctor's office."
"If you want to spy on Americans, get a warrant," Boebert added.
The bill would also prohibit warrantless facial recognition scanning in public spaces – including schools and places of worship – and ban federal agencies from purchasing commercially available location data as a backdoor around the warrant requirement.
Vigilantes have been cutting Flock cameras down with angle grinders, smashing them, and leaving American flags on the wreckage in Houston, Georgia, the Carolinas, and across the country.
Boebert said she doesn't condone destroying private property – but she understands the frustration.
"Everyone is being violated each and every day with these Flock cameras," she told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Flock Safety Already Rewrote the Rules to Protect Itself
Flock Safety's terms of service update in February 2026 told the whole story.
In that update, the company handed itself permanent rights to vehicle data collected under any contract – rights that survive even after a city cancels its agreement – and restructured its liability terms to put criminal prosecution effectively out of reach.
That is not the move of a company confident it's been operating within the law.
Eighty-two Flock contracts have already been terminated across 28 states since 2021 – and the number keeps climbing as cities discover what they actually signed up for.
Courts have mostly sided with the company so far, relying on the outdated legal logic that Americans have no expectation of privacy in public.
The Supreme Court knocked a hole in that argument back in 2018 when it ruled in Carpenter v. United States that long-term location tracking requires a warrant.
Flock's system – logging 150 million vehicles every day, storing data for weeks or months, reconstructing the full daily movements of any American who drives – is exactly what Carpenter was designed to stop.
Massie's bill would lock that constitutional protection into federal statute, closing the door on every workaround surveillance companies have used to avoid it.
The Founders put the Fourth Amendment in the Constitution because they knew what government surveillance does to a free people.
The question now is whether Congress has the backbone to enforce it.
Sources:
- Francis Kapper, "1984 Has Arrived, And People Are Fighting Back," The Daily Caller, July 12, 2026.
- Thomas Massie, "Surveillance Accountability Act – HR 8470," Congress.gov, April 23, 2026.
- Press Release, "Representatives Massie, Boebert Introduce Surveillance Accountability Act," boebert.house.gov, April 23, 2026.
- "Massie Introduces Surveillance Accountability Act," Spectrum News 1, April 24, 2026.
- "Flock Safety's Private Surveillance State: 80 Cities Are Pulling Out," State of Surveillance, June 5, 2026.
- "Why Flock Safety Finds Itself in a Surveillance Backlash," Government Technology, July 2026.
- "Flock Ruffles Feathers in Michigan," Mackinac Center, July 20, 2026.
