Holy Flock: GOP Congressman Has Had Enough of Government Tracking Americans

Republican Rep. Pat Harrigan (NC-10) has apparently had enough of the government’s growing network of surveillance cameras that track Americans wherever they drive. On Thursday, he introduced legislation to impose serious restrictions on Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers, including requiring warrants before police can search most of the information they collect.

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Considering what these cameras can do, it’s overdue.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles, recording license plates, locations, timestamps, and even identifying features such as bumper stickers. Police departments can search that information, including records shared by other agencies, to reconstruct someone’s movements.

The company says its network scans roughly 20 billion license plates every month. That’s an awful lot of information on Americans who haven’t done anything wrong.

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He’s got a point. Police don’t need a searchable history of your daily routine simply because a camera happens to be mounted on a pole outside your neighborhood.

And we’ve already seen what happens when someone with access decides to get creative.

As RedState previously reported, Florida police officer Christopher Goodson was arrested in August after investigators alleged he searched for his estranged wife’s vehicle 717 times using Flock’s database. Some searches allegedly occurred while he was off duty.

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He didn’t mince words: “We have to approach this in a 702-like manner.”

Harrigan didn’t stop there. He had a specific framework in mind.

“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.”

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RedState’s Susie Moore recently covered a federal ruling in Oklahoma, where a judge found that police violated the Fourth Amendment by searching a month’s worth of a driver’s movements without a warrant.

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Harrigan’s bill would still allow police to use the technology during legitimate investigations and emergencies. What it would stop is the routine, warrantless collection and searching of Americans’ movements, the kind the government has somehow managed to live without for most of its existence. The Constitution didn’t come with an asterisk for convenient technology.

(*) Full article: https://redstate.com/ben-smith/2026/10/18/holy-flock-gop-congressman-has-had-enough-of-government-tracking-americans-n2208295