PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to
Stop Flock & End the Surveillance State
Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.
Today, you were surveilled.
You almost certainly drove past a camera — owned and operated by Flock.
It photographed your plate. It recorded the time and the direction you were going. Then it added that information to a file that is building a profile of your movements and your behavior.
Nearly a hundred thousand of these cameras have gone up across this country, most of them in the last few years.
Flock maintains a corporatized database of all of your movements and sells access to agencies across the nation.
Flock's camera network logs every car in a county, maps its historical movements, and lets an ever-expanding number of agencies search it. Freely, openly, without a warrant, and without sufficient restrictions.
Nobody asked you if they could build a profile of your movements. There was no voter referendum, no congressional approval, and no warrant issued by a judge.
The Fourth Amendment says no warrant issues except on probable cause, "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Particularly. By name. A camera network that logs every car in a county, and lets an ever-growing list of agencies search it, describes no place and names no person.
Empowering law enforcement with the tools it needs to stop crime is necessary — but arming the surveillance state with unrestricted, unsupervised access to every citizen's movements is an assault on our constitutional protections.
Americans should not have their movements and their behavior tracked by their own government and by a handful of megacorporations at the same time.
What Flock sells
The cameras are the sensor. The product is the database.
Every read flows into one national system, so a plate photographed in Napa can be searched from Georgia. On top of that database, Flock sells a feature it calls "pattern of life." Pick a plate, and the system maps everywhere that car has been for fourteen days, thirty days, or longer, with a heat overlay showing where it spends its time. Home. Work. Church. The doctor. A rally.
"Pattern of life" is a military intelligence term for building a behavioral profile of a target by watching where they go. It was developed for enemies in a war zone. It is now sold to small-town police departments and pointed at every driver on the road — through deception, loopholes, and decisions made three counties away.
Never with a citizens' vote.
It is being used to stalk women
At least fifty officers in this country have been charged with or accused of using these systems to stalk women. Intimate partners, ex-partners, women they wanted to meet.
In Texas, an officer was indicted on a hundred felony counts after running more than ten thousand searches on his ex-girlfriend and the people around her. In Missouri, an officer accused of stalking his ex-wife through their divorce was found to have broken no law, because there wasn't one. We are not regulating this. Our government is complicit in it.
Most officers will never do this. But the tool goes out to thousands of people with no rules attached, and one of them is always going to be somebody's dangerous ex-husband.
A woman leaving a violent man is told to change her route, change her plates, and tell nobody where she is staying. All of it assumes he cannot stalk her through a camera network.
Why Congress must stop it
The Fourth Amendment restrains the government. It does not restrain Flock. A private company builds the surveillance system the government is forbidden to build, then sells the government access to it. Everyone stays technically clean, and the protection disappears. It is a corporate loophole, and Congress left it open.
California already restricts sharing this data across state lines, and our Attorney General has said much of what is happening now is unlawful. It happens anyway. A state can govern its own cameras. No state can reach a national database.
Closing that requires members of Congress who will stand up to the largest data companies in the country instead of cashing their checks, and who understand the technology well enough to regulate it. We have neither.
Until Congress establishes a federal regulatory framework, I am calling for an immediate moratorium on all government use of Flock's surveillance network.
Where the line is
Automated warrants for emergency situations. When a child is taken, when there is an active threat of human trafficking, when there is an active shooter, when there is a credible threat of violence or terrorism, the search should run immediately and automatically, with a judge reviewing it afterward.
I have two kids. If one of them were taken tomorrow, I would want every camera in this country pointed at finding them.
Tough on surveillance and tough on crime are not opposites. The cameras stay. The camera that finds a kidnapped child works exactly as well with a warrant behind it. What a warrant stops is the other ninety-nine percent — logging every car in the county, forever, on the chance something turns up later.
Here’s what I’ll do — and why
Stop Flock, and stop its spread into our communities. No private company builds, keeps, or sells a searchable record of where civilians drive across jurisdictions. A town can buy cameras and hold its own data briefly. It cannot feed that data into a national system a hundred and seventy agencies can query. A camera in your town should not be a search engine in fifty states.
Call for an immediate moratorium. Congress will take time to write the rules, and every day it takes, the database gets bigger. Until there is a federal regulatory framework, no government agency should be using Flock's surveillance network at all.
Ban behavioral tracking of civilians. No company builds or sells a pattern-of-life product aimed at people who are not under investigation. Counterterrorism tooling belongs in counterterrorism, under a warrant.
Require a warrant, with a real emergency exception. If the government wants to know where you have been, it goes to a judge, and it cannot buy its way around that. The Fourth Amendment should not have a payment option. For a kidnapped child, an active human trafficking situation, an active shooter, or a credible threat of violence or terrorism, the search runs immediately and gets reviewed afterward, logged, and published.
Make stalking through these systems a federal crime. In Missouri, there was no law to break. Looking somebody up with no case behind it should cost you your job, your certification, and your freedom. Anyone with an active protective order gets their plate flagged, so every search against it is logged and disclosed to them.
Give first responders what they need. Radios that work across county lines. Dispatch that talks to the next county. Enough deputies to answer a call at two in the morning in Colusa or Lake. License plate readers, with strict limits and warrant requirements written into the law.
What this means for Our District
As of this writing, 26 agencies across eight of our nine counties are on this network. Only Colusa is out, and every read those cameras take can be searched from two thousand miles away.
More than fifty American cities canceled or shut off their contracts this year, red counties and blue cities alike. The Republican governor of Texas halted state funding. Congress has done nothing.
In May, the House passed a bill putting a Department of Homeland Security investigative unit at the center of a new national intelligence hub, over the objection of more than a hundred and twenty civil rights organizations. Fifty-nine Democrats voted no.
Our congressman voted yes.
Nearly three decades in Washington, and on this he has not written a bill, cosponsored one, or held a hearing. He is funded by the companies that collect our data and build the artificial intelligence that reads it back. The Center for Effective Lawmaking ranks him near the very bottom of this region's delegation in effectiveness.
Nearly three decades of seniority is supposed to buy a district something.
The bottom line
Police should have every tool they need to solve real crimes, and a judge should be in the room when they use them. No corporation should get to build the surveillance system and write the rules for it too.
They need a reason, and they need to ask. That is in the Constitution because Americans died over it.
SOURCES
Flock's "pattern of life" feature, the Oshkosh contract reversal, and the company's contradictory public statements: Footnote4a — Pattern of Life: Why a City Canceled Flock · Fox 11 — Oshkosh Common Council reconsiders Flock contract · InvestigateTV — Flock says its cameras don't track people. Its own training videos say otherwise.
Officers using these systems to stalk intimate partners — at least fifty documented cases: 404 Media · Institute for Justice · CNN — Kentucky officer, 2,000+ searches · Click2Houston — Katy officer · First Alert 4 — Brentwood officer
National data sharing, AI flagging of "suspicious" movement, and product expansion: ACLU — Flock now using AI to report us to police · ACLU — Flock's aggressive expansions
Municipal cancellations and state-level retreat, including Texas: NPR · EFF — Texas and Florida step back from ALPRs · State of Surveillance — 2026 cancellation tracker
California law on ALPR data sharing and the Attorney General's position: EFF — Lawsuit challenges San José's warrantless ALPR mass surveillance · EFF — Policy position on ALPR surveillance
Government purchase of commercially available data as a warrant workaround: Brennan Center — How law enforcement buys your data
Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, H.R. 2853, House Roll Call 157, May 12, 2026, passed 348–60: U.S. House Clerk · Congress.gov · Leadership Conference coalition letter
Napa Police Department's Flock transparency portal, including the roughly 170 external organizations with access: Flock Safety — Napa CA PD