Sanders to seek ban on Flock license-plate tracking

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced plans to introduce legislation aimed at blocking Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers on public roads and restricting AI-powered mass surveillance.

According to Sanders’ office, the draft bill would ban the sale and deployment of live-collection camera systems that capture license plates on public roadways. The proposal would also bar private companies from maintaining searchable, long-term databases of vehicle movements and impose short retention limits on collected data.

The draft would limit law-enforcement access to historical movement records by requiring warrants for certain searches, establish transparency reporting requirements, and require independent oversight of the AI models used to match and analyze images. It would create civil penalties for improper data retention and unauthorized use of plate-history searches.

The announcement named Flock Safety, a private company that sells cameras and software to law enforcement, local governments and neighborhood groups, as the immediate target. Flock’s systems capture license-plate numbers, timestamps and locations and can link multiple reads to create travel histories when combined with cloud databases and search tools.

Privacy advocates have criticized such networks because they can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has traveled over days, weeks or months. Civil-rights groups have urged shorter retention periods, tighter limits on law-enforcement queries and independent audits of algorithms used to analyze images.

Flock defended its products as tools that help police recover stolen vehicles, solve robberies and address violent crime. The company says it limits unrelated data sharing and provides privacy controls for customers. Several law-enforcement agencies and some municipal officials have said the technology assists investigations and public-safety work.

The proposal would join existing debates in city councils, state legislatures and Congress about how to regulate surveillance technologies and AI used in policing. Some local governments have already restricted or banned certain uses of automated license-plate readers and facial-recognition systems. Federal lawmakers have held hearings on AI in policing and surveillance technologies, and privacy legislation has moved in committee without becoming law at scale.

Sanders’ office said the bill’s draft language will target sales of live-collection systems for public-road monitoring, the creation of centralized commercial plate-tracking databases, warrantless queries of historical movement data and the absence of independent oversight for image-matching algorithms. The final text and a legislative timeline have not been released, and it is not yet known which senators would co-sponsor the measure or how quickly it would advance through committee.