Somewhere in a public works garage or a police evidence lot, there may soon be a very expensive pile of hardware with nowhere to go. That’s the bet Rep. Thomas Massie is making with the bill he filed this week, one with a name that sounds more like a bumper sticker than a piece of federal legislation: the Flock-Off Act.
Here’s the part almost nobody covering this story is saying plainly. The bill doesn’t ban a single camera. It doesn’t outlaw automated license plate readers, and it doesn’t force any police department to shut its network down if that department wants to keep paying for it with its own money. What H.R. 10221 actually does is narrower, and far more revealing about how this technology spread across the country in the first place. It cuts off the federal government’s contribution to the bill.
That distinction exposes something most drivers have never considered. The cameras quietly photographing their plate at intersections, along toll corridors, and increasingly at the exits of gated subdivisions usually aren’t owned outright by the agencies running them. They’re rented, bundled into an all-inclusive annual subscription that covers the hardware, the software, the cloud storage and the cellular data, sold almost exclusively by one company. Flock Safety started as a Y Combinator startup in 2017 chasing car break-ins in an Atlanta neighborhood. By its own account, it was valued at $4.8 billion in 2023.
What the Flock-Off Act Actually Does
Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) filed H.R. 10221 on September 2. It prohibits federal funds from being used to purchase, install, maintain, operate, or upgrade automated license plate readers and biometric surveillance cameras, language broad enough to cover Flock’s competitors, though Flock is clearly the company its name is aimed at. Agencies that used federal money for the systems would get 180 days to remove them or lose funding under whatever program paid for them, with violators required to repay the U.S. Treasury. The bill even reaches the back end of these deployments, blocking federal dollars from covering the cloud subscriptions, data storage, and data-sharing agreements that keep the camera feeds running.
Massie has framed the fight in stark terms, accusing cities that deploy the cameras of turning their communities into “a version of 1984.” The cosponsor list is the more interesting tell. Alongside further-right members like Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, and Chip Roy sits Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, the kind of odd-bedfellows coalition that surveillance fights have produced for two decades, ever since Patriot Act reauthorization debates split both parties down the middle rather than along it.
The Subscription Nobody Told You About
Flock doesn’t sell cameras the way a hardware company sells a product once and walks away. According to the company’s own pricing page, a customer, whether a police department, a city, or an HOA, pays one bundled annual fee covering the devices, LTE connectivity, cloud storage, software, installation and what Flock calls automatic upgrades. Nothing is purchased outright. When a contract lapses, Flock’s own FAQ describes a formal offboarding process that includes hardware removal.
Flock doesn’t sell cameras. It sells a subscription to your license plate.
That detail is why the Flock-Off Act’s 180-day removal clause isn’t as radical as it sounds. It’s asking agencies to do something Flock’s contracts already anticipate happening whenever the money stops. The Auto Wire has already documented what that relationship looks like when it breaks down, including a West Virginia vandalism case where ownership was unclear, and Sen. Hawley’s inquiry into Flock’s camera network.
Two Carve-Outs That Give Away the Real Argument
Buried in the bill’s exceptions is the clearest evidence that this fight was never really about the technology. The Flock-Off Act explicitly preserves federal funding for automated license plate readers used for one narrow purpose: collecting or enforcing tolls. It also protects funding for cameras within one mile of the northern or southern border used to interdict smuggling and trafficking. A camera that reads a plate to bill a driver for a bridge crossing stays funded. A camera that reads the same plate to alert a detective it passed a crime scene is the surveillance state Massie wants to defund.
The difference isn’t the lens or the algorithm behind it. Both run essentially the same computer vision. The difference is who cashes the check.
The Part No Bill Touches
Even if H.R. 10221 clears a divided Congress, a genuine uncertainty for a five-cosponsor bill, it would only choke off one funding source. Flock’s own pricing page confirms the company already sells identical hardware and software directly to HOAs, private businesses and houses of worship, no federal grant, no city council vote and no public records request required. Florida ran into the same blind spot this summer, when a push to ban police use of the cameras left the private network selling plate data to lenders and insurers completely untouched.
That’s the real story hiding inside a bill named for an insult. Congress isn’t arguing about whether your license plate gets watched. It’s arguing about who signs the check for the privilege, and the company doing the watching has already built a business model that doesn’t need Washington’s money to keep collecting.
What Readers Should Remember
None of this settles the questions The Auto Wire has been tracking for months, including whether the underlying technology is even reliable, after Flock’s AI misreading plates in Roseville, California, or whether the Supreme Court’s recent phone-tracking rulings extend Fourth Amendment protection to a car’s location history over time. H.R. 10221 doesn’t touch either fight. It only decides, for a subset of cameras, who receives the invoice.
Whatever happens to the Flock-Off Act in committee, the camera on the pole outside your subdivision will keep scanning your plate at the same rate it did the day before Massie introduced it. The only question this bill actually answers is whether your city council or the federal government gets the bill.