Congress Just Declared War on the Cameras Tracking Your Car. Here Is What the Ban Flock Act Would Actually Do.

On October 1, 2026, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced H.R. 10691, the Ban Flock Act, a bill that would bar federal agencies from using automatic license plate readers and choke off the federal money that keeps many police departments' camera networks running. A day later, Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley introduced a Senate companion. The target is one company in particular: Flock Safety, whose network of more than 120,000 cameras scans and records roughly 20 billion vehicles every month, according to the sponsors' press release.

This is not the first time license plate readers have drawn political fire. But the Ban Flock Act arrives paired with a court ruling and a city revolt that make it harder to dismiss as messaging legislation. Whether it passes or not, the surveillance business is about to have its worst quarter of political weather in years.

What the bill would actually do

The bill works through money and legal liability, not by smashing cameras. Section 3 would prohibit federal agencies from acquiring, possessing, accessing, or using ALPR systems or what the bill calls "captured plate data," unless Congress specifically authorizes the use. Section 2 defines that data broadly: plate numbers, images, locations, timestamps, and vehicle characteristics collected not just by fixed cameras and police vehicles, but by drones, tolling infrastructure, private security networks, homeowners' associations, commercial parking operators, and data brokers.

Section 4 goes after the funding pipeline. State and local governments that keep using ALPRs would become ineligible for grants from five federal departments: Justice, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security. Section 5 separately bars spending federal money to buy, lease, operate, or maintain ALPR systems or to obtain their data. Any future congressional authorization of federal ALPR use would have to cap data retention at 48 hours and include, in the bill's words, "rigorous protections for due process, privacy, free speech and association." Toll collection gets a narrow exception, with its data deleted within 48 hours of payment.

The bill does not try to outlaw a camera. It tries to starve a network: take away the federal money, and 120,000 cameras lose the funding pipeline that put them up.

The bill also creates enforcement teeth. Evidence obtained in violation of the law would be inadmissible in federal court. Individuals could sue for actual and punitive damages, and state attorneys general could sue to enforce the ban. As of October 14, 2026, the bill is proposed legislation: it was referred to multiple House committees and has not become law.

The two sparks that lit the fuse

The bill landed one day after a federal judge ruled that a Tulsa County Sheriff's Office deputy violated a woman's Fourth Amendment rights by running a warrantless ALPR database search of Flock Safety's camera network for her license plate. The decision is not binding precedent, but it is among the first of its kind, according to reporting summarized by privacy outlets, and it gave the sponsors a courtroom data point to pair with their legislation.

Three days later, the city of Troy, New York, passed Local Law 3, which requires the Troy Police Department to delete ALPR data after 72 hours unless it is flagged for a criminal investigation, and to share it only under a court order or with the Rensselaer County District Attorney's office. The vote followed months of activism by a group called DeFlock Troy, and the council is simultaneously suing the city's mayor for using emergency powers to pay the Flock Safety contract. The law is local, but the pattern is national: cities are pausing, removing, or auditing ALPR contracts on their own.

Behind both moves sits a summer of reporting on officer misuse of the systems, including tracking of former partners and wrongful arrests, and technical findings about how much data the cameras retain at the device level. A surveillance tool that was sold to cities as a stolen-car finder is being re-litigated, camera by camera, as a mass-tracking network.

Why this bill matters even if it stalls

Analysts give the bill long odds before the midterm elections, and it is competing with narrower, bipartisan proposals that would impose warrant requirements, audit logs, and shorter retention windows without cutting funding. That is the more likely regulatory endpoint: guardrails rather than a ban.

But the bill's scope is wider than its odds suggest. Notably, it does not propose a general ban on drones, aerial surveillance, or Drone as First Responder programs. Drones are covered only when they produce captured plate data. That carve-out matters commercially: a Fast Company article published October 13, 2026 reports that Flock's drone divisions are the company's most profitable segments, which means the fastest-growing part of the business sits just outside the bill's harshest provisions.

Flock Safety, for its part, says it has reduced default retention to seven days and added an audit tool, positioning itself as responsive to the criticism. The question regulators are now asking is whether a retention policy and an audit log are enough when the underlying product is a searchable, nationwide record of where every car goes. As of mid-October 2026, Congress, the courts, and city councils are all answering that question at once. The Ban Flock Act is the loudest version of the answer.

References

Sources for this article: DroneLife on the Ban Flock Act and drones, MyPrivacy.Blog on the bill and the Tulsa County ruling, and Particle News overview of the legislation.