On the Surveillance State

Flock Off

A warrant for your phone, a free pass for your bumper.

For H.R. 10221, 119th Cong. (2026), Flock-Off Act

This reached me on the morning of 1 October, and that timing brings it to the beginning of this essay instead of a footnote at the bottom of it. On Monday, September 28, 2026, a Kentucky State Police trooper was killed on Interstate 65. On the afternoon of Thursday, October 1, 2026, the Louisville Metro Police Department set out how it caught the man now charged with killing the KSP trooper, and the account alleges the cameras this essay asks Congress to defund were heavily relied upon instead of the FBI’s constant pinging the suspect’s phone and an eye-witness calling LMPD onto the scene where they eventually caught up to him. I am not going to pretend that is inconvenient and move on. It is one of the strongest cases anyone will ever make for this technology. I am not blind to the alleged benefits technology like this has.

Please note that nothing in this is to be taken away from the tragic killing of Trooper Phillips. Trooper Phillips died protecting the Commonwealth he loved and left a beautiful family behind. This is not something to take lightly.

The trooper was Hayden Phillips, of Glasgow, who had worn the uniform since 2023. He was killed on a Monday afternoon near the Smiths Grove exit in Warren County, and the man charged with it drove about seventy miles north before the search ended. May Trooper Phillips rest in peace, may his family recover from this horrific incident, and may justice be done upon the man who murdered him.

So let’s take the department’s account at full value. Investigators used constant cell phone location pings by the FBI to put the suspect in a general area. A tactical crime analyst in the Criminal Interdiction Division then went to the Flock system and turned that general area into a specific one. Officers converged on Dixie Highway, a Grappler took the car’s rear wheel, and the arrest followed. Chief Paul Humphrey credited “the layers of technology, tools, equipment, great tactics and coordination between officers, detectives, civilians and the community.” A trooper was dead on Monday and the man charged with killing him was in custody the same day. Anyone who wants to argue about plate readers has to start there.

Start there, and then notice what actually happened. Police had a plate. It had been broadcast across the state through at least three alerts over emergency broadcast systems. They had a constant phone ping that had already narrowed the search to a part of one city. An analyst asked a database where that one known plate had been. A citizen called the vehicle in to LMPD just minutes before the police made their approach. That is a targeted query about a specific vehicle in an active murder investigation, and almost nobody objects to it. It is not what the Flock-Off Act is about, and it is not what anyone sensible is frightened of.

What makes that query possible is a different thing entirely and that’s where the issues come from: a standing, permanent, warrantless record of where every car in a city has been, collected from everyone, kept against the day that somebody wants to ask. September 28th is the easiest case that record will ever have to justify itself. An easy case tells you nothing about the hard ones. An easy case tells you nothing about the rampant misuse and abuse that has been occurring by those allegedly securing our communities.

The Court just said the quiet part

On June 29th of this year the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States. Police investigating a bank robbery had used a geofence warrant to make Google hand over Location History data for phones near the bank around the time of the crime. By six votes to three, in an opinion by Justice Kagan, the Court held that this was a search.

We decide the first part of that inquiry today, concluding that the police conducted a search when they gained access to Location History data. An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.

Chatrie v. United States, 609 U. S. ___ (2026) (slip op., at 2)

Read the last clause twice. It disposes of the two arguments that have kept license plate readers outside the Fourth Amendment for a decade.

The first is duration. The answer has always been that a camera only sees your car for an instant, in public, on a road you chose to drive on. The Court was asked to accept a version of that and refused. The reasoning of SCOTUS was not written about phones alone. It is very clear what they meant.

That approach makes all the more sense when, as with Location History, officials can select the time-limited set of materials they want from an all-encompassing database. Then, the durational bounds on the data actually acquired do little to address the Fourth Amendment’s concern about “a too permeating police surveillance.” Di Re, 332 U. S., at 595; see supra, at 12. What creates that concern is that the government can access all of a cell-phone user’s movements, in both public and private places—that it possesses a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities.

Chatrie v. United States, 609 U. S. ___ (2026) (slip op., at 21)

A virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens’ activities. That is a description of a plate reader network written by a Justice who was describing something else. The point is not how much the government took out. The point is that it, the government, is standing in front of a drawer containing everything.

The second argument is the third-party doctrine. I.e. you gave the data away, so you cannot complain when the government collects it. The Court had already declined to apply that rule to cell site location in Carpenter v. United States in 2018, and in Chatrie it declined again, finding no good reason to treat Location History differently from the records in Carpenter. The doctrine came from a bank depositor’s cancelled checks and a telephone company’s call logs. It has now failed twice to stretch over the question of where a person’s body has been.

Now hold the plate readers up against that. Flock’s cameras, and similar ALPR devices (AXON) record a vehicle, convert it to data, and ship it to a cloud system where it is retained and made searchable, across countless agencies, across countless states, and the Federal government. Best part of it? It’s all funded by taxpayers. No warrant is required to collect it and, in most places, none is required to query it. Compared with the two hours of Google data in Chatrie, this is longer, broader, aimed at everyone rather than at a crime scene, and queried on an officer’s say-so. If the Fourth Amendment reaches the one, the argument that it has nothing at all to say about the other is running on fumes.

What this essay is not claiming

Chatrie did not decide the constitutionality of license plate readers, it just laid down essential framework. It was about Location History held by Google. It did not even decide the case in front of it. It didn’t have to. because the Court held that a search occurred and sent the matter back to the Fourth Circuit to decide whether the warrant actually used was reasonable. There remains a long line of cases, starting with United States v. Knotts in 1983, holding that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in a single journey on a public road. Nobody should tell you Chatrie overruled that, because it did not. However, Chatrie built upon the framework that Knotts first laid down. As is the beauty of the Judicial system we use here in the USA.

What Chatrie does is something narrower and more useful. It tells you which way the Court is moving, and it kills two specific defences that plate readers have been leaning on. A court applying this reasoning to a system that follows millions of cars in perpetuity, rather than one car on one trip, is being asked a question the Court has now twice answered in the same direction.

Why defund rather than regulate

This is the serious objection to the Flock-Off Act and it’s truthfully an easy answer. If the complaint is that the cameras are searched without a warrant, write a warrant requirement. Why does Thomas Massie’s bill cut the money instead?

(1) In general.–Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be obligated or expended, directly or indirectly, by the head of any Government agency or by any recipient or subrecipient of Federal funds (including any State, local, or Tribal government) to do any of the following:

(A) Purchase, lease, acquire, install, deploy, maintain, repair, replace, upgrade, or operate a covered camera system or any associated component.

H.R. 10221, 119th Cong. § 2(a)(1) (2026)

Because a warrant rule regulates the asking and leaves the archive exactly where it is. The Fourth Amendment governs searches. It does not, on its own, stop a private company from building a national record of vehicle movements and selling access to it, and it does not stop that record existing for the next administration, the next contractor, or the next officer who decides to look up an ex-partner. A warrant requirement is a rule about the door. The Flock-Off Act is a rule about whether the building goes up with public money. Again, these ALPR cameras are being planted and installed with taxpayer money. No taxpayer money funding it? No cameras used.

Look at what the bill actually defines. In true Massie style, the bill is completely honest about its target.

(3) Covered camera system.–The term “covered camera system” means any fixed, mobile, or portable photographic, video, optical, infrared, biometric, or other electronic device that–

(A) automatically captures and processes an image or a recording of a motor vehicle or a license plate of a motor vehicle using machine learning or other automated image-processing technology to–

(i) extract license plate numbers, motor vehicle characteristics, or other information from such image or recording;

(ii) convert such information into computer-readable data; and

(iii) transmit such image, recording, or information to a remote or cloud-based system for storage, analysis, retrieval, or sharing; or

H.R. 10221, 119th Cong. § 2(c)(3)(A) (2026)

Note what the definition turns on because it is not the camera. It is the retention and the transmission: the conversion into computer-readable data and the shipping of it to a remote system for storage, retrieval, and sharing. The bill is aimed precisely at the all encompassing database, which is the thing the Court said creates the constitutional concern. There is also a deadline attached. Systems already running on federal money go dark within 180 days, as a condition of continuing to receive the funds.

The bill is not absolutist about it either, which is worth saying because its opponents will imply otherwise. Section 2(b) carves out toll collection and cameras operated within a mile of the border in conjunction with Customs and Border Protection. Those are the two cases where a plate is being read for a defined, bounded purpose rather than banked against future curiosity, and the drafting leaves them alone.

Congress cannot hold that plate readers violate the Fourth Amendment and it should not wait a decade to be told. What it has is the power of the purse, and the purse is why these cameras are on poles in towns that could never have afforded them.

The record of what it is actually used for

The misuse is not hypothetical and it is not distant. A Shively police officer, Asad Zahir, was arrested in August after running more than two thousand Flock searches on the plates of a woman he shares a child with, more than two hundred of them while she held a protective order against him. A former Louisville officer, Roberto Cedeno, faces stalking charges. An LMPD detective, Wesley Troutman, is under investigation again over searches on a vehicle assigned to a department employee, logged as drug investigations, after an earlier episode in which he shared his login with a federal agent who ran immigration searches.

Now this and it is billboard worthy… On 16 September the Louisville Metro Police Department cut Flock access from every officer down to investigators and analysts, added training, and started logging searches. Two weeks later the same department was crediting the same system with a capture. Both things are true. The order they happened in is the argument: the restriction arrived after a reporter found the stalking, not before, and it arrived at a department that had been handing the keys to everyone for years.

A system is not characterised by its best day. It is characterised by what it does on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody is watching, and the ordinary Tuesday here involved two thousand searches on a woman who had gone to a court to be left alone.

The strongest things said against this

That the cameras helped catch a man charged with murdering a state trooper. They did, just days ago, and the answer is not to dispute it. The answer is that a system can perform exactly as advertised in its best case and still be the wrong thing for a free country to build, because what is on trial is the standing archive and not the single query. We do not evaluate general warrants by how often they turned up contraband. We should not become a surveillance state.

That the phone ping was surveillance too, and this essay is not complaining about that. A targeted request for a named suspect’s location in an active murder investigation, reviewed by somebody other than the officer who wants it, is what the Fourth Amendment contemplates. A standing record of everybody’s movements queried at an officer’s discretion is what it was written against. After Chatrie, even the first of those now generally requires a warrant.

That the misuse can be fixed with policy. It was supposedly fixed on 16 September, by a department that had already been through the Troutman episode and did not act until the press arrived. Audit logs record abuse; they do not prevent it, and they only work when somebody reads them. That is, if no one is auditing those that watch us,

What to do

Pass the Flock-Off Act. Because a country that has just been told its citizens hold a reasonable expectation of privacy in a record of where their phones have been should not be spending federal money to build the same record of where their cars have been, and then searching it without asking anyone. Yes, the cameras work… They trace EVERYONE. That’s not the point, the point is protecting our Constitutional rights.

The Court has said the government may not stand in front of that drawer without a warrant. Congress can decide not to pay for the drawer.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Benjamin Franklin

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