A nationwide network of AI-powered license plate cameras is logging Americans’ movements into a searchable database that police can query without a warrant, according to lawsuits, court records and an academic study examined in a recent analysis tracing the technology’s roots to post-9/11 surveillance law.
Flock Safety, the dominant vendor, holds contracts with more than 6,000 law-enforcement agencies across nearly every state. Its cameras record passing vehicles into a system that departments can search directly, with no minimization procedures, no court order requirement, and no oversight body positioned between the camera and the search.
Virginia and California cases
In Norfolk, Virginia, a lawsuit found that 176 cameras had logged one driver’s location 526 times over four months. In California, a class action alleges Flock allowed out-of-state and federal agencies, including ICE, to search plate data through what internal audit logs described as a “side door,” allegedly in violation of the state’s sanctuary and license-plate privacy laws.
More than 30 cities have canceled Flock contracts since last year, and the ACLU has filed a brief in the Fourth Circuit arguing the technology conflicts with Fourth Amendment privacy protections.
The federal money trail
Funding for many of these camera programs runs through the Homeland Security Grant Program, created alongside the Department of Homeland Security by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Administered through DHS-supported intelligence “fusion centers,” the program remains a primary channel state and local agencies use to purchase automated license-plate readers.
That funding structure traces back to the legal architecture built after the September 11 attacks. The Patriot Act, passed 45 days after the attacks, removed barriers between intelligence and law-enforcement information-sharing and gave the FBI authority under Section 215 to collect business records deemed “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. Section 215 expired in March 2020 when Congress failed to renew it, along with two related authorities — the only time before this year a major post-9/11 surveillance power was allowed to lapse outright, following a brief 2015 lapse before reauthorization.
A pattern of abuse under court oversight
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, created by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, allows the government to collect foreigners’ communications abroad without a warrant. Because Americans communicate with foreigners, their messages are swept into the same database, and the FBI can search it using American identifiers — a practice known as backdoor search.
In 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found 17 significant errors and omissions across four FISA applications targeting Trump campaign associate Carter Page, including an instance in which FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered a document to conceal that Page had been a source for another U.S. agency. Clinesmith later pleaded guilty to a federal crime.
In 2023, declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions revealed the FBI ran more than 278,000 Section 702 queries between 2020 and 2021 that violated the bureau’s own legal standard, including searches on more than 100 Black Lives Matter protesters, 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign, and 23,000 people connected to the January 6 Capitol riot. The court itself described the pattern as “persistent and widespread.”
Louisiana’s Speaker cast the deciding vote
When Congress reauthorized Section 702 in April 2024, an amendment requiring a warrant before the FBI could search Americans’ data failed in a 212-to-212 vote. Progressive Democrats and hardline conservative Republicans supplied most of the yes votes, while centrist Republicans and most Democratic leadership opposed it. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., switched his vote from yes to no at the last moment, killing the amendment. The underlying reauthorization bill then passed.
Weighing the tradeoff
An independent academic study published in August 2026, drawing on national FBI crime data across 216 agencies, found vehicle theft fell about 11 percent and motor vehicle theft arrests rose nearly 16 percent in the year after fixed cameras were installed, with effects concentrated in the hardest-hit communities. The same study found no statistically detectable improvement in whether stolen vehicles were actually recovered — a more modest result than the industry’s own marketing claims.
Public resistance has grown alongside the rollout; some Americans have resorted to physically destroying the cameras. The Supreme Court has twice narrowed the legal doctrine that information passed through third parties loses Fourth Amendment protection — in Kyllo v. United States (2001), involving thermal-imaging devices, and Carpenter v. United States (2018), involving multi-day cell-site location records. Neither ruling has yet been extended to license plate data.
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