Sanders, AOC Unveil 'Ban Flock Act' on Plate Readers
The Facts
- U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) released the text of the Ban Flock Act on Friday, legislation that would bar federal agencies from using automatic license plate readers or accessing the data they collect.
- The measure would also halt federal grant funding to state and local governments that use the readers or contract with companies that provide them, and it would allow Americans to sue the federal government for violating their rights.
- Sanders claims that "Flock has shared state information with federal immigration officials" and that officers have used the technology "to investigate activists" and track women without their consent. At least 56 municipalities have ended or rejected contracts this year.
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The Spin
Establishment-critical narrative
Blanketing neighborhoods with 100,000 AI cameras turns ordinary life — doctor visits, school drop-offs, church — into a permanent government record, and no free country should run that way. Tax dollars have no business bankrolling a private surveillance dragnet that hands billionaires a profit stream built from tracking everybody's movements. Cutting off the federal money is the only real check left.
Pro-establishment narrative
The cameras belong to the communities that buy them, and those communities decide who sees the data, as federal sharing is switched off unless a local agency says otherwise. Guardrails keep piling up — blocked immigration and reproductive health searches, required case numbers and offense codes, full audit trails — well past what any law demands. Yanking the funding just means more unsolved killings and more missing kids never found.
