Bipartisan bill ties 10 percent of state highway funding to a five-use limit on plate readers

A resident complains about a car blocking a driveway, and someone at the police department runs the plate. Under the No FLOCK Act, parking enforcement is one of the uses that would put a state's highway money at risk, along with speeding enforcement, traffic studies and minor drug investigations ^[6].

The bill leaves the hardware alone. Cameras stay on the poles, and the restriction lands on what an agency may do with them: the text permits use only for "enforcing toll systems, identifying stolen vehicles, missing or endangered persons, vehicles registered to persons with a warrant for a felony offense, or investigating a vehicle involved in a felony offense" ^[5]. A full ban on Flock systems has been the number one demand of the protest movement against the Atlanta-based company, and this bill does not go there, according to WIRED ^[8].

The penalty is 10 percent of the annual federal money a state is due for highways, roads and bridges ^[3]. The Department of Transportation sizes that allocation using factors such as how many roadways a state has and how busy they are ^[12]. WIRED puts the loss for a non-compliant state at tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, beginning in October 2028 if the bill passes this year ^[11]. The deadline gives more than two years of notice, with the midterms less than two months out ^[2][16].

Congress used the same lever to set the national minimum drinking age, to standardise what counts as driving under the influence, and to regulate billboards along highways ^[13]. About 25 states and territories already have plate reader laws, mostly requiring transparency or prompt deletion of unneeded data, and few of them limit what the systems may be used for, according to the Policing Project at New York University School of Law ^[19]. For most states, then, a whitelist means new drafting.

"Our investigation into Flock exposed serious gaps in oversight, and this bipartisan bill would put clear limits in place to prevent abuse while preserving legitimate public safety uses," Krishnamoorthi said in a statement ^[7]. Cloud said: "Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund the shredding of their own civil liberties or the growth of a surveillance state" ^[20]. He called the bill "a first step toward reining in unchecked surveillance" ^[21].

The misuse record WIRED cites is one report finding at least 100 instances of alleged abuse over the past eight years, including officers using footage on former romantic partners ^[18]. Those instances average about 12 a year nationally, and the figure is a floor ^[1].

Data sharing is untouched. A state could hold its agencies to the five uses and still let them pass plate reads to other government agencies, including immigration authorities ^[9]. Flock did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment on the bill ^[10]. Its Washington lobbying spending has been steady over the past 18 months, and it recently hired a fifth firm, according to federal records ^[15].

President Trump told reporters on Sunday that the cameras help law enforcement ^[17]. A separate bipartisan bill would bar federal funding from being used to buy Flock cameras ^[14].

The calculation that decides this for a department is last year's plate lookups split two ways: those that fit one of the five permitted reasons, and everything else. The second group is the part of the program that needs a new justification, and where that group is large, the highway money is what a department is putting at risk. A governor doing the same split gets a different figure, because the exposure is 10 percent of a highway allocation calculated from road mileage and traffic volume ^[3][12].