Rep. Thomas Massie is introducing legislation to strip federal funding from any city or police department that deploys Flock Safety surveillance cameras, drawing a line against a private-company surveillance apparatus that tracks millions of law-abiding Americans and funnels their data into nationwide police databases.
The stakes are straightforward: your car's license plate, dents, bumper stickers, and roof racks are being scanned, catalogued, and shared across thousands of agencies — all without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment was written to stop exactly this kind of general warrant, where the government searches everyone to catch anyone.
Massie, a Kentucky Republican who represents the state's 4th District, announced the bill July 25 on X. "I'll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens," he wrote, posting a parody flag of a snake coiled around a camera with the words "don't flock on me." Massie, who is retiring after his current term ends in January, has nothing to lose and no committee chairmanship to protect — which is precisely when politicians tend to tell the truth.
Flock Safety, based in Atlanta, has quietly become law enforcement's default surveillance vendor. According to DeFlock, an activist group tracking the company, Flock has wired itself into more than 5,000 police agencies with nearly 90,000 cameras deployed since 2018. The system generates billions of plate reads per month, all flowing into shared databases accessible across jurisdictions. This is not a camera on a pole. It is a national tracking infrastructure built by a private company and sold to government.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley has previously called DeFlock a "terroristic organization" before walking the remark back. So the head of a surveillance company labels privacy activists terrorists, then apologizes when the light hits him. Remember that.
The New York Post reported that 18 officers in Georgia — including a supervisor who used the system to track her boyfriend — have been arrested for misusing Flock data. When the people operating the system are abusing it, the system is the problem.
Backlash is building on the ground, too. The city of Newport, Kentucky, ended its Flock pilot program this month after residents raised privacy concerns. Meanwhile, vigilantes in multiple states have taken to physically destroying the cameras — four were chopped down in Connecticut just last week, the Post reported. When citizens start vandalizing surveillance equipment, the social contract is fraying.
Flock's spokesperson told the Post that Massie's bill would "have real consequences for public safety" and claimed the company has supported over 1 million investigations and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people. The company line is the same one always offered to justify dragnet surveillance: trust us, the trade-off is worth it. The founders didn't agree, and neither does Massie.
The Cincinnati Enquirer noted that Kenton County Police are still pushing to install six Flock cameras at local parks and a jail parking lot — even as neighboring communities are pulling the plug. Follow the money: federal dollars subsidize the purchase, Flock collects the data, and police get a tracking tool with no warrant requirement. Everyone wins except the citizen driving to work.
Massie's bill faces long odds in a Congress that routinely funds surveillance and calls it safety. The open question is whether enough lawmakers will remember that the Constitution was not written to make policing convenient — it was written to make government constrained.
