Rep. Pat Harrigan, a Republican who represents North Carolina’s 10th District, introduced legislation Thursday that would place new restrictions on Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers used by police departments nationwide, including a requirement that officers obtain warrants before searching most of the data the devices collect.
The bill, H.R. 10822, would require most records to be deleted within 24 hours of collection. It would also bar searches based on political or religious bumper stickers and prohibit private companies from selling the data or using it to train artificial intelligence systems.
Flock’s cameras photograph passing vehicles and log license plates, locations, timestamps and identifying features like bumper stickers. Police can search that information, including records shared between agencies, to piece together a person’s movements over time. The company says its network scans roughly 20 billion license plates every month.
In an interview published Saturday, Harrigan laid out his concerns about the scope of that data collection.
“When you consider that these systems track everything that you do, where you work, where your kids go to school, where you even go to church, I think it’s pretty easy to understand why people are concerned.”
“So, that’s an extraordinary amount of information about somebody that the government has that has never committed a crime.”
Harrigan has pointed to cases of alleged misuse to make his case for stronger limits. In 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, with some searches allegedly conducted while he was off duty. In North Carolina, another officer was accused of using the system 31 times to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife. Harrigan referenced that case in a September interview, saying the technology was already being misused.
He has said he wants protections modeled on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a federal surveillance authority that has itself drawn criticism over government access to Americans’ communications.
“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.”
Beyond the warrant requirement, the bill would impose audits and reporting requirements on agencies using the technology. People subjected to illegal searches could sue for at least $1,000 per violation, and states that fail to adopt qualifying protections could lose some federal criminal justice funding.
The legislation follows a federal court ruling in Oklahoma, where a judge found that police violated the Fourth Amendment by searching a month’s worth of a driver’s movement history without a warrant.
Harrigan’s bill would still permit police to use license plate readers during active investigations and emergencies. It targets the routine, warrantless collection and searching of location data on drivers who are not suspected of any crime.
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